


Metamorphosis

by colorado_blue



Series: If These Walls Could Talk [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Suicide Squad (2016)
Genre: Descent into Madness, Emotional Manipulation, Everyone Has Issues, Explicit Consent, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Hallucinations, Harleen has issues, Harley Quinn Origin Story, Highly inadvisable sexual scenarios, How Do Feelings?, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Joker (DCU) Has Issues, Masturbation, Murder, Non-Graphic Violence, Recreational Drug Use, Threats of Violence, Voyeurism, mad love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:41:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 66,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24530224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/colorado_blue/pseuds/colorado_blue
Summary: Harleen Quinzelle had a plan. She had clawed her way to get to where she was now and she wasn't about to let anyone keep her from getting inside the mind of Gotham's darkest figure. Not her boss, not herself, and not her unduly fascinating patient.Joker had a plan. His impromptu vacation to Arkham was an unfortunate pitstop but nothing was going to stop his games. Not the guards, not the Bat, and not the maddening doctor who had come to take up far too many of his thoughts.Their plans, their games weren't supposed to get intertwined. But they had.
Relationships: Joker (DCU)/Harleen Quinzel
Series: If These Walls Could Talk [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1772812
Comments: 69
Kudos: 69





	1. First Impressions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The second her office door clicked shut, Harleen tore open the folder like a child opening a birthday present. She’d been hearing about this particular inmate long before she was a doctor or had even moved to Gotham. While Dr. Reed seemed to think this assignment was a somewhere between dead end and a death sentence, she could hardly contain her excitement.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well... I told you I'd be back! It took longer than I'd hoped, but the end of the world has a way of giving you time to write. I hope you all are staying safe and staying healthy in this crazy time.  
> For anyone who read If These Walls could talk, this is generally a prequel to it (though my next project is rewriting that one). The starting point of Mr. J in that story is the ending point of this one. So, needless to say, we aren't going to reach anything resembling fluffy or soft for him and while the couple WILL be moving to a far more balanced, egalitarian relationship it is a transition that needs time to develop. Be patient with the story, I promise we're heading there.  
> A few heads up for trigger warnings for this read: an intentionally *ultra vague* implied reference to childhood sexual abuse, binge drinking, stalking, and (as per usual for this duo) graphic wonton violence. Please take care of yourself and I promise to always include chapter specific trigger warnings with each post.  
> With that out of the way, let the story begin.

“I really am sorry to ask you to do this, Harleen” Dr. Reed said sympathetically, shifting his jacket and brief case awkwardly to place a thick manila folder he’d been holding under one elbow on the corner of her desk. Harleen’s eyes bounced between Dr. Reed’s old, sad eyes and the stack of papers, trying to hide their excitement.

“It’s not a problem!” She smiled gently back up at the concerned looking older man. “What was the point of hiring a PhD/Md if you’re not going to use all of my skills? It will be good to get to flex some therapeutic muscles, I haven’t gotten to use them in a while.”

“It’s just until we can get a new therapist that doesn’t have a conflict of interest, I promise, then you can pull back to only doing medication management. We’re doing interviews and working as fast as we can, but you know how slow bureaucracy is.” He chuckled guiltily, pushing his thick glasses up his nose. Harleen smiled again, attempting to stifle her impatience for the man to stop apologizing and to leave her to pour over the documents.

“Don’t worry, I’m happy to do it. It’s a challenging case but I always liked the ones that played hard to get.” Harleen laughed with a falsely good-natured smile, picking up the thick file from her desk and anxiously waiting to tear into it.

“Don’t get your hopes up too high. Really. His potential for rehabilitation is negligible at best. Lord knows the best of us have taken a crack at him the various times he’s been through the system.”

“I’ll give it _my_ best. Who knows, maybe the, what is this the third or fourth time?” She laughed with a shrug, “maybe whatever number of times this is will be the charm.”

“You’re a sweet girl, Harleen.” Dr. Reed sighed sadly, patting her on the hand. She resisted the urge to draw her hand away in irritation and forced herself to look bashfully at her shoes. “Just please be careful. His last stay was before your time and it didn’t end well for the doctors who had worked with him. If at any time you feel your safety is compromised in any way, you need to let me know. Immediately.”

“Thank you, Dr. Reed. You’re too good to me.” She smiled, hoping he would get the message and leave. She wasn’t stupid. It was obviously a dangerous case. She hadn’t met the only surviving member of Arkham’s newest patient’s old treatment team but from what she’d heard the man was still too traumatized to speak. Back when she was in residency, she had watched the news coverage of his last breakout and had heard the rumors that still circulated around the water cooler years after the fact.

“I would encourage you to consider keeping security in the interview room with you, I know you usually prefer to keep things private but he’s a not your usual patient. If I recall correctly, he wasn’t terribly med compliant, and he was especially prone to violence after ECT. Once you restart it, I would all but mandate you keeping a guard in the room,” Dr. Reed shook his head sadly.

“I’m sorry, restart it?”

“It’s all in his file, but all his other doctors had felt that ECT was reasonably effective with some of his delusions.” Dr. Reed said with a dismissive wave of his hand.

“Given how those incarcerations ended I would be inclined to argue against its effectiveness.” She hoped Dr. Reed didn’t intend for her to just copy the previous treatment plans. That would be extraordinarily frustrating for her and disappointing for him.

“Read the file, we’ll chat tomorrow after your introductory meeting” He said sighed over his shoulder while pulling on his jacket. “I’m heading out now, please follow suit and go home soon. It’s late and you’ll be needing your energy for tomorrow, little lady.”

The second her office door clicked shut, Harleen tore open the folder like a child opening a birthday present. She’d been hearing about this particular inmate long before she was a doctor or had even moved to Gotham. While Dr. Reed seemed to think this assignment was a somewhere between dead end and a death sentence, she could hardly contain her excitement.

Her days since coming to the asylum had been dominated by tinkering with the medications of delusional, psychotic, paranoid and occasionally manic criminals. For the most part they were violent offenders who had committed brutal, one off assaults. Organized, premeditated offenders were extraordinarily rare in Arkham. Most weren’t capable of it.

Oh, she loved tracing her patients’ stories from ill-fated origin to violent conclusion and hearing their detailed first-person accounts of the offenses they committed. But she never got to play inside the minds of Gotham’s darkest figures.

Now she would get to revel in the psyche of Gotham’s most notorious villain: The Joker.

* * *

Within moments of meeting her he hated her.

Well, that wasn’t quite true, he hated her before he met her. He hated her when she was just a vague outline of a person. He hated her since the Bat told him he was being transported to Arkham. He hated her when the intake team forced him into a cell and told him he’d be meeting with his new doctor in the morning. He hated her when the next morning two guards sedated him and forced him into a straitjacket.

He hated her long before they met but meeting her certainly didn’t help.

Joker was seated in an uncomfortable metal folding chair at a cold table, glaring into the distance trying to imagine just what kind of torture the next hour would be when the siren announcing the unlocked door sounded. He expected one of the old men who dominated Arkham to enter. He hated those doctors.

Instead, a young woman who couldn’t even be thirty entered the room. The first thing he noticed about her was that she looked like as if Barbie had dressed up in a scientist costume from a discount Halloween store. Her long blond hair had been pulled back into an almost appallingly boring bun and she was wearing thick rimmed glasses that seemed to have been pulled off of the face of the archetypical nerdy character in any young adult novel.

Joker swore silently to himself. The only thing worse than the snobbish academics who tried to trick him into supplying them with the content for a best-selling true crime novel were the young and self-righteous. They were tediously optimistic.

“Hello, Mr. Joker.” Doctor Barbie said with a patronizing smile, “may I sit?”

“Oh, please, Mr. Joker was my father” he laughed, leaning forward and smiling dangerously just to watch the little doctor squirm. The doctor raised one eyebrow causing her condescending smile to take on a particularly irritating quality, making Joker growl. He hated the ones who pretended to be brave, or worse, aloof. They were particularly irritating. Though, they were rather fun to kill (but to be honest, he hadn’t encountered someone who wasn’t fun to kill).

“What should I call you then?” She asked with a smile in her voice, pulling out the chair and sitting down delicately.

“Joker or Mr. J if you insist on formalities.”

“Well let’s try that again. Hello, Mr. J. My name is Dr. Quinzelle, I will be managing your medications and acting as your therapist for the time being.”

“Oh no, is the Arkham family feeling a little tight on the budget? Or are you just multitasking for fun?” He asked with no small hint of condescension in his voice.

“All our current therapists happen to have conflicts of interest when it comes to you.” She said without looking at him, flipping through several pages on her clipboard.

“What did little old me do to deserve their cold shoulder?” He asked in a parody of confusion.

“Other than kill several of their colleagues, burn down two of their apartment buildings, and be involved in an unrelated attack that killed a close family member of another one of them?”

“That does sound like something I would do.” He mused ironically.

“Do you have any questions you would like to ask me before we get started?” She continued, flipping her stack of papers to the intake questionnaire and looking back up at him with obnoxiously innocent eyes.

“Only one.”

“Yes?” She asked overly politely. He smiled to himself and leaned back in his chair, wishing he had use of his arms but knowing there was no chance in hell of talking his way out of the straight jacket (at least not yet).

“In my storied career of visiting this noble institution I’ve had three kinds of doctors. First, the cocky experienced ones who are angling to get a paper or book out of working with me.” He smirked, looking the young doctor up and down. “I haven’t seen you around here before which leads me to believe you can’t possibly be in the first group. So, you’re either the second kind, the young naïve ones who think they can actually change me, or the third, the dispensable ones who their colleagues won’t miss when I kill. So, which one are you?”

“You’re funny.” She smirked.

“Ah, so you’re the second kind.” He groaned, rolling his eyes at her naivete. He should have guessed based on her manicured appearance and age that she was a fresh-faced idiot with something to prove who didn’t have the experience to know any better. “Ask your coworkers who knew the doctors who worked with me before just how funny I am.”

“I did and I don’t think the word funny came up in any of those impromptu eulogies.” She laughed making him quirk his naked eyebrow. He hadn’t met a doctor who told jokes about murder, let alone laughed at them, before. It was an odd if not part particularly interesting quirk. But then again, he couldn’t expect her to be interesting. She was a thorn in his side who he would tolerate until he got bored and kill her. Then they would either give him a new doctor, who he’d also kill, or killing her would be part of his breakout and there would be no time for the institution to give him a new plaything in a lab coat. There was no point in being interested in something as meaningless as a person.

“If that’s it, I’d like to start the intake.” She asked with a shrug.

“Fine.” He grunted, already irritated by the insipid questions he’d been asked every time the Bat dragged him to the looney bin.

“What is your name?”

“The one, the only Joker the Clown Prince of Crime and bane of Batman. The archvillain of Gotham and public enemy number one.” He deadpanned.

“Birth name?” She sighed obviously resisting the urge to roll her eyes.

“I don’t have one.” He growled making the doctor’s eyes narrow in thought for a moment before a small knowing smirk crossed her lips.

“Did the person you were before you were The Joker have a name?”

“Clever girl, you did your homework last night.” He purred, feeling something between irritated and amused at her suddenly excited expression. “But I don’t remember.”

“Do you know where you are right now?”

“Specifically? Trapped in a tiny boring room with a tiny boring person. Generally? Arkham Asylum.”

“How old are you?”

“What a rude question!” He objected, mock-horrified.

“How old would the person you were before you were the Joker be if he was still alive?” She asked, not even flinching at his feigned irritation- which made a very real jolt of irritation shoot up his spine.

“I don’t remember.”

“Where were you born?”

“In the conventional sense of the word, I don’t remember.”

“And in the unconventional?” She asked with a curious but distinctly unimpressed tilt to her head.

“Gotham made me.”

“Hmm,” she hummed to herself making a note before asking, “are you now or have you ever been employed?”

“I rather think that ruling Gotham counts as a full-time occupation.” He laughed before leaning in and asking with mock concern, “do you know how to ask a question that isn’t on your list?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. However, right now we’re doing the intake not a normal session. Would you please answer my question?”

“I don’t know if I believe you Doc.” He scoffed, unsure what new level of boredom he’d achieved to have to entertain himself by annoying his doctor. “Come on, ask one.”

“Mr. J,” she began firmly.

“Just one, then we can go back to your silly questions.” Not that he planned on answering them, but she didn’t have to know that.

“Fine,” she sighed, “one question then we go back to the intake. The police report says that there were multiple Catwoman sightings during your apprehension. Was she involved with your heist?”

“You got to pick any question, and that’s what you pick?” He groaned, rolling his eyes. He would be shocked if the doctor made it to his breakout, she was too obnoxious _not_ to kill. “Yes Doctor, I tried to play nice with the other children. But the Cat had to go throw a hissy fit about me blowing up the joint half-way through our group project.” He growled under his breath making no effort to contain his rage. She’d gone and tried to ruin his game and then the Bat had shown up and really put a damper on things. Now he was stuck in a boring asylum with boring people and no games to play.

“We’ll come back to that later,” Dr. Quinzelle said diplomatically. “I’d like to hear about why you decided to work with another person.”

“Aw, shucks Doc, what are you so interested in me for?” He glared at her.

“It’s my job to be interested in you, Mr. J. Now, if you’re ready, I’d like to continue with the intake.” She paused. If she was waiting for his approval, she was going to be disappointed. After several moments she seemed to give up and read the next question, “Who was your primary caretaker as a child?”

“I leapt fully grown Athena-like from Gotham’s underbelly.”

“A well-educated, villain.” She chuckled under her breath making him raise a blank eyebrow. “Do you have any siblings?” She asked with a clear note of amused exacerbation in her voice.

“How many more questions?” He asked with an irritated sigh, knowing damn well that the intake questionnaire was thick enough to be confused with a book. “To the best of my knowledge God’s only has one child.”

“A messiah complex, how original.” She muttered under her breath making Joker laugh.

“It’s not a complex if it’s true,” He purred with an intentionally haunting smile.

“How would you define your sexual orientation?” She listed before Joker cut her off with a near hysterical laugh.

“I’m an idea, not a person.” He spat between chuckles. The questionnaire wasn’t just boring, it was absurd. How could any question they asked their endless series of interchangeable half-rate criminals give them even the slightest insight into _The Joker_?

“I don’t know what you’re hoping to get out of this little interview, but ideas don’t have a place of origin, a family, work history, relationships. Ideas are beyond the grasp of the dull and grubby hands of small-minded people like you.” He growled, leaning forward baring his golden teeth.

Joker glared at her, waiting for her to get scared and back down. Instead she stared back at him levelly. For a long moment her big eyes, hidden by the most unimaginative of glasses, held his gaze fearlessly. Then they flickered lower on his face, latching on to something and going out of focus. Her attention seemed to completely leave him as her mind wandered in some other direction that he was unable to follow as she studied his countenance.

“See something you like?” He chuckled without humor trying to ignore the shifting unease that flickered in his gut. There was something off about his otherwise dangerously boring doctor.

“Given you’re not using your big boy words in a remotely helpful way and I sincerely doubt anything you’ve told your previous doctors is anything approaching true, I don’t have much to go on other than your appearance.” She snapped.

“I was under the impression Arkham left phrenology behind a hundred years ago. Is that the kind of medicine you practice, Dr. Quinzelle?” He scoffed.

“Phrenology would require me touching your head and given what I’ve read in your file, I somehow don’t think you’d appreciate my putting my hands on you.”

“Why don’t you come over here and find out?” He growled with a clear threat in his voice. Dr. Quinzelle hummed in response, cocking her head to the side.

“I was under the impression that…” She trailed off, flicking to a page on her clip board and scanning her lines of notes before looking back up at him, “ideas couldn’t be grasped by the dull and grubby hands of small-minded people like me.”

“You have been listening.” He laughed dangerously with a sarcastic smile on his face. He might hate her, but at least the toy Arkham had given him would be fun to play with.

* * *

Harleen glanced at the clock in her office, 5:50. Her monthly report was due in ten minutes and she didn’t know how to finish it. She should have turned it an hour ago with all her other ones, now she’d be stuck in traffic and barely make it to the gym in time to spar with someone her own size. With her luck, she’d get stuck with one of the ‘roided out overgrown boys who would forget to go easy on her. Last time that happened she’d shown up to work with bruises and Dr. Reed had gotten far too interested in her extra curriculars.

“Focus, Harleen.” She growled, tapping at her keyboard as if the random collection of letters and symbols she pressed would somehow morph into words and sentences. Writing it shouldn’t be so hard, she’d already complied her notes from the last four weeks of their meetings and written out the various medications she’d tried and their side effects, but the report felt… lacking. So much of it read “the patient would not disclose,” “the patient claims not to remember,” and “the patient was not responsive to relevant questioning.”

Their sessions were dominated by him baiting her into a sarcastic back and forth with minimal therapeutic value or him claiming memory loss when she managed to get a half-useful question in edgewise. It was oddly amusing, even he seemed bizarrely entertained by it, but it wasn’t remotely helpful. More annoyingly sometimes he’d spend ten, twenty minutes just staring at her with a vaguely threatening look of amusement on his face. She’d spent an entirely unprofessional amount of time fantasizing about throwing her clipboard at him. She was a stubborn creature and, damn it, he was not going to cheat her out of getting to play around in the most interesting mind she’d had access to in years.

Instead of causing him bodily harm or letting him go back to his cell, she’d decided by the end of his first week that the best way to respond to his silent staring was to give him a taste of his own medicine and hope he’d lash out in an interesting way. Which he usually did.

She’d gotten more than one angry tirade about chaos and power out of him through that technique. While it had been intriguing the first few times, she’d milked just about all of the relevant information out of his long-winded speeches that she could. There was something there to put in her report, but not much.

A side effect of her unconventional technique meant that she’d spent a distinctly abnormal amount of time staring at the man. Of course, she knew what he looked like; she’d seen him on the news for years. Even when she still lived in Brooklyn, before she even had a TV, she’d seen his image. But it was one thing to look at monster on TV and yet another thing completely to be sitting staring at one in person. She knew that, she’d been working with monsters for years. Arkham was full of criminals who ranged from garden variety brutes up to truly evil individuals. But she’d never met someone like The Joker.

His skin wasn’t just pale, it was white. She used to think it was just makeup or drug usage, but she was beginning to wonder if it was possible for a person to bleach themselves. She’d sketched the ‘J’ and the ‘damaged’ tattoos in her notebook and on the margins of paperwork more than she cared to admit. It was odd to see him without makeup; she was so used to his blood red lips and darkened eyes haunting Gotham’s new papers. He was still intimidating, even in a straitjacket, but he seemed incomplete. Like a bride who’d wandered down the aisle in full makeup and hair but had forgotten her dress. The point was still communicated, the meaning was still there, but it wasn’t quite right.

The missing parts seemed to disappear when he smiled his haunting, almost nightmarish, grin. There was something arresting about it that she couldn’t quiet put her finger on. It wasn’t quiet fear, she wasn’t sure she remembered what that felt like anymore, but there was a jolt of adrenaline. The first few days after he’d been brought in, he’d been the talk around the water cooler, and several collogues had made less than professional comments about his physique (if not his face) being wasted on a monster like that.

It had made her laugh that she hadn’t even noticed his body. She’d been too distracted by the hypnotic carnage he left in his path and the frenzied notes her predecessors had taken on him. By the time she’d met him, she’d been distracted by the glint of his golden grill. According to the forms the clinical intake team had slapped on her desk, it hid a collection of badly chipped and broken teeth (apparently compliments of a less than civil debate with Batman). Being caught staring at it like a like a parakeet looking at their own reflection their first session had been embarrassing to say the least. But she’d been fascinated that instead of wearing them like a point of pride, as he did with many of his scars, or replacing them with a set of false porcelain teeth, like she had with hers, he’d encased them in gold. He didn’t hide his almost feral grin- he gilded it.

Maybe there was something to write about for her report there, she pondered. He clearly exhibited narcissistic traits. She hadn’t decided if it was because he’d grown up rich and had equated expressions of material wealth with success or if he’d grown up poor and clung to any sign of wealth to prove his worth. While she was tempted to guess the later, she couldn’t point to any real evidence and admittedly was most likely just projecting.

She could fill whole pages with speculation on what his upbringing had been like but as far as she could tell, it was just that- speculation. His old doctors and therapists had filled volumes with fictional narratives that tried to make sense of his behavior. Not justify it, but at least explain it. They all seemed to need to expound on how a creature so similar to themselves had spun out so violently. She could easily spit out pages and pages of reckless fiction about his upbringing and inner life but trying to give reason to why he’d become the Joker was far less interesting than studying the actual Joker.

But that just brought her back to her original problem. If she wasn’t going to wax poetic about his origin story, what was there to report about their sessions? Every now and then, when he wasn’t mocking her or deflecting questions, he would occasionally say something useful or interesting but for the most part he wouldn’t give an inch.

“Come on, Quinzelle.” She muttered to herself, quickly adding several lines about the utility of a rewards-based system for sociopathic patients. Maybe if she gave him a little more freedom, he’d be slightly more cooperative? It would make him feel a little more in control which would probably loosen his lips- though it could also get her killed. Dr. Reed probably wouldn’t allow it, but maybe she could get away with it with some of the younger more impressionable guards… It wasn’t her strongest report, she admitted while pressing submit, but it would have to do.

She could already hear the lecture Dr. Reed would be giving her on Monday about how she was wasting valuable time by delaying ECT treatments. He kept claiming it loosened the patients lips and made him far more malleable. But for some reason, the idea of a ‘malleable’ Joker made Harleen cringe. What was she supposed to do with an agreeable Joker who would numbly agree to whatever background story she provided him? It wasn’t a terribly mature response to an authority figure, but having Dr. Reed tell her repeatedly that she needed to do it just made her not want to do it even more. It didn’t help that he didn’t bother to hide their glee at the idea of using a procedure that The Joker reportedly hated so much. Dr. Reed wasn’t alone in that desire, just about everyone in the asylum wanted to get their hands around The Joker’s throat, but it still made her want to slap him.

She just hoped her report was good enough that Dr. Reed wouldn’t decide to take her completely off the case. It didn’t seem likely, but the risk of being torn off the most interesting case she’d ever been assigned made an ugly scowl threaten to crawl across her face. She’d never met someone like the Joker, someone so indifferent to social norms with such a developed philosophy and commitment to relentless self-service. It was fascinating. And hypnotic. It was like looking in a funhouse mirror that stared back at her and beckoned her closer.

While the risk of being reassigned was negligible, she knew Dr. Reed would expect more of her if she was going to be kept on as The Joker’s therapist. Though the puzzle of how one achieves the Herculean task getting the unvarnished truth out of a sociopath was one that she wasn’t sure she had the answer to. Her current strategies certainly weren’t working. It just ended in them sarcastically quipping back and forth at each other until he stared lecturing about his twisted and endlessly captivating manifesto.

If she could just get a small glimpse inside of his mind, then maybe she could use that leverage to crack him open and trawl through his fascinating world. She sincerely doubted that he would willingly expose anything approaching the truth when anyone was looking. The only space where he may not be censoring himself in all of Arkham was his cell and there was no way for her to observe him without him knowing.

“Unless…” Harleen muttered to herself, pushing back from her desk and staring blankly at her now black computer screen. There were security cameras in every cell, but they were only used when the patients were on suicide watch. It was rare but not unheard of to do sleep studies of trauma patients, but that was always in limited formats with their, and often a court appointed guardian’s, explicit consent. But if he found out he’d censure himself, or worse, give her false information.

Her bosses would never approve of her using the security camera footage for this kind of study, it was a blatant civil rights violation. But if it worked, she thought with a grin, it would give her unprecedented access to one of the most twisted minds alive.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this.” She whispered to herself without really believing it. It wasn’t as if she was new to breaking rules. This was just one she hadn’t broken before, she thought with a small smile. She would to buy a few things, but what was $1,000 compared to getting to tear into the most interesting mind she’d ever found?

Pulling her bag of sparring clothes that she hid under her desk, she wondered if it was all worth it. Every day she reminded herself just what she’d become if she didn’t hold herself in check. The stack of patient files on her desk was all the evidence she needed of just what would happen to her if she let her impulses control her. Being Dr. Quinzelle might be exhausting, but at least she woke up in her own bed. Besides, she thought as she looked at the mug shot of the Joker atop his file, sometimes she was gifted with something entertaining.

And, looking at her illicit shopping list, she could create some fun for herself every now and then too.


	2. Witness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You’re a bold one aren’t you? I think I like this side of you, Doc” Joker chuckled with dark amusement. He couldn’t remember who the last person to threaten him was, but he was fairly certain whoever they were had died screaming. “Answer me this, before you rush of in a self-righteous huff, which are you? A Barbie pretending to be a little monster? Or a little monster pretending to be a Barbie?”  
> “We’re not here to talk about me.” She snapped condescendingly, clearly trying to regain her professional bravado.  
> “I’m not sure why you’re gracing this cell block with your angelic presence at all, but I’ll let that slide for now,” he crooned, “You’re playing a game and I want to know the rules.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I meant to mention this last week, but I'm using this map of Gotham posted by Roysovitch and Crow-453 for my story. It's incredibly detailed and was so useful for the creation of my story. All credit goes to them, I have exactly 0 of the skills required to make it! Check it out at https://www.deviantart.com/roysovitch/art/Earth-27-for-Nitwits-Gotham-City-728146466
> 
> Slight trigger warning for stalking.

Joker scowled to himself. There were few less dignified things than being forced to shower in front of an audience. He couldn’t wait till Frost’s team figured out how to smuggle him a weapon and breach Arkham’s security systems. Imagining exactly how he was going to kill each of the guards and several of the inmates was the only thing that allowed him to remain cockily indifferent to their glances and commentary.

At least the weekend staff who he’d been trapped with since Friday evening finally shuffled out of the asylum in the early hours of Monday morning. How he’d only killed one of them so far was something of a small miracle. While the days of the week weren’t particularly important to J outside of Arkham, now that he was trapped inside, he found himself staring at his calendar and counting down the hours till his next source of amusement.

The guards were scared stiff of him, which was somewhat amusing, but playing with them was so predictable. He hadn’t seen his favorite toy, Doctor Barbie, since Thursday and he found himself almost looking forward to their Tuesday appointment. At least his appointments with his strange doctor were less tedious than sitting in his cell. While her appearance was almost offensively boring, there was something _almost_ interesting about her that he couldn’t quiet put his finger on. He hadn’t decided when he was going to kill her yet but didn’t think it would be too soon.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” J chuckled to himself. “She might get annoying.” The guard locking the door flinched violently away from the Joker when he spoke, making J laugh madly. God the guards were boring.

He considered starting a fight with the Monday afternoon shift guard who had busied himself with double checking the lock on his cell but decided against it. That one could potentially be useful. The guard had just bought a new house he couldn’t afford and had a whole gaggle of brats that he wanted to send to private school. That could be arranged if he would get him some important passcodes. Well, the guard could be given just enough cash to think it would be arranged and give Frost the needed intel. Then he would join the ever-growing list of ‘victims’ J had ordered hits on.

J sat down on his cot, hitting his head against the wall in boredom when he heard an unexpected voice. He was the only inmate in this section of the block and all his guards so far were male. But instead of the usual low rumble of their voices that had become a tedious background track, he could hear the tinkle of his doctor voice. Interesting, she hadn’t paid his cell block a visit before.

J walked over to the bars to try and hear what he could of the conversation between Harleen and the guard on duty. By pressing himself into the corner he could just see Dr. Quinzelle but was unable to see the guard she was speaking to. She looked as if she’d been walking off the floor. He must have just missed her while he was showering.

“I was just checking to see if a patient was in. I had a question about side effects from a medication he just started this week and I totally forgot to ask during our session.” Dr. Quinzelle said in a ditzy voice. J smirked to himself, he knew for a fact that he was the only patient she had on this floor and he hadn’t started any new medications since his first week in Arkham. Or rather, he hadn’t been prescribed any new medications since his first week. It wasn’t as if he took any of them.

“Next time ask one of us to accompany you. It’s not safe for a lady like yourself to be down here alone.” The unseen guard said sternly. Joker resisted the urge to laugh. As if any of the guards could offer anything close to protection when he inevitably decided to hurt her.

“There are cameras everywhere and I’m sure you’d come to my rescue if I screamed,” his doctor giggled back flirtatiously. Joker raised his naked eyebrows curiously. Lying about why she was on the floor, trying to distract a guard- if he didn’t know better, he’d think Dr. Barbie was up to something.

“I’ve always liked my damsels in distress.” The guard chuckled back, in a voice that clearly communicated he had looked her up and down and had liked what he had seen. “But the cameras can’t catch everything and even if did the people on watch might not see it till too late.”

“Oh, I have every faith in you boys.” She chuckled. J could hear a faint note of irritation in her voice that the guard didn’t seem to notice. How many times had she pulled from this particular bag of tricks to get what she wanted, he wondered absently? And, much more interestingly, what was it that she wanted?

“You know we keep The Joker down here.” He faux whispered, obviously trying to impress her.

“Oh, really?” Dr. Quinzelle asked looking shocked. If J didn’t know that she was his doctor he would have thought that she genuinely had no idea he was in the hospital.

“Oh yeah. He’s a real piece of work, I got into something of a scrap with him the other day.” The guard bragged. Joker ground his teeth together. He knew which guard Dr. Barbie was talking to. That hadn’t been a fight. It hadn’t even been funny; he’d been restrained and far too sedated to make it interesting. He had enough dirt on that man to make his life a living hell before he eventually killed him. It would be good to have a new way to entertain himself for the time being. Relying on playing with the Barbie to keep himself from getting too bored was just pathetic.

“Did you?” She responded, jolting J from his tangent. Looking at her carefully, he noted that her expression had tightened. The irritation that had barley laced her words before grew in volume but still somehow went over the guard’s head.

“I know it is exactly political or professional- but me and the boys figured he needed a bit of a lesson. He smacked one of my boys around pretty good last week, poor son of a bitch lost two teeth and broke his nose. But we got our own back.”

“What do you mean?” Dr. Quinzelle demanded with what J was now confident was a vaguely angry expression. Interesting. It seemed his doctor had taken a bit of a personal interest in him, or at the very least felt protective of him- which made hilariously little sense. Perhaps she was just another bleeding heart who got her feathers ruffled every time one of her patients got knocked around. But somehow, he didn’t think the same doctor who joked about her coworker’s murder would be too concerned if the guards were being overly enthusiastic with her patients.

“Well, don’t go telling the big boss but after he was done with one of his appointments last week, we had a little fun with him before we let him out of his restraints.” The guard chuckled, stepping closer and running a hand up Harleen’s arm suggestively before his hand wandered down her waist. “I can trust you not to tell, can’t I?”

J was a hard man to surprise. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt truly unprepared for an outcome let alone genuinely blindsided. But he was surprised to say the least when his perfect little doctor gripped the man’s wrist twisted it in her grasp so that the man, to prevent his shoulder from dislocating, turned until his face was pressed against the wall and his arm was pinned behind his back.

“If you touch me again, I’ll break your arm. Understand” She hissed through perfect gritted teeth, seemingly too angry to look around and make sure there were no witnesses. Amateur, Joker chuckled to himself approvingly.

“What are you doing?” The guard cried.

“Understand?” Harleen growled again.

“I could get you fired for this!”

“You said it yourself, the cameras down here aren’t so good. Besides, how many times have you been hauled up to HR? I’m pretty sure they’d believe the pretty, young doctor over the office creep.” She said in a tone that J barley recognized as coming from the same doctor who he verbally sparred with twice a week.

“Fine! Fuck. Let go of me. I won’t do it again.” He winced.

“I don’t think I believe you.” She whispered angrily. J pressed himself harder against the bars of his cell hoping to see more. Barbie’s face was contorted into a beautiful, parody of a grin. J could feel his breaths come faster as he watched this creature who he could hardly reconcile with the Doctor Barbie he’d come to expect. No this was something else, someone else- some unexpected game his doctor was playing.

“I promise! I won’t do it again.”

“Won’t do what?” The doctor, who had surprised Joker so thoroughly, asked in an overly innocent tone.

“Won’t touch you again.” The guard gasped.

“Fine.” She sighed, letting his arm drop. “Be good and we won’t have this conversation again.” She warned, staring after the guard as he all but sprinted away from her. She had just finished smoothing her perfectly boring bun and lab coat when Joker began to slowly clap.

“That was beautiful, Dr. Quinzelle.” J growled approvingly. Harleen spun around and jumped, her face going almost as pale as his when she locked eyes with him. She opened and closed her mouth a few times, but no sound escaped her gaped lips. “Don’t worry, I won’t tattle.” He continued in a sing-song voice.

“They wouldn’t believe you if you did.” She recovered, her eyes flickering with a kind of ferocity that made J feel a rush of blood flow in an unfamiliar and unwelcome rush southward. Dr. Quinzelle closed the gap between the corner where she’d pinned the guard his cell in a half dozen long strides and looked him in the eye evenly.

“No, they wouldn’t, but I could still try.” He laughed, trying to ignore the unexpectedly interesting fire in her eyes.

“Go ahead. My word versus the office creep and Gotham’s most notorious sociopathic narcissist. I like my odds.” She grinned.

“You flatter me, Dr. Quinzelle.” He purred back.

“Just think, next time we have a session I could scream for the guards and tell them a pretty story about you attacking me. They wouldn’t even question it; in fact, I think they’d enjoy dragging you down to solitary.”

“You’re a bold one aren’t you? I think I like this side of you, Doc” Joker chuckled with dark amusement. He couldn’t remember who the last person to threaten him was, but he was fairly certain whoever they were had died screaming. “Answer me this, before you rush of in a self-righteous huff, which are you? A Barbie pretending to be a little monster? Or a little monster pretending to be a Barbie?”

“We’re not here to talk about me.” She snapped condescendingly, clearly trying to regain her professional bravado.

“I’m not sure why you’re gracing this cell block with your angelic presence at all, but I’ll let that slide for now,” he crooned, “You’re playing a game and I want to know the rules.”

“The rules?” She laughed sarcastically, “I wasn’t aware there were rules.”

“Ah,” J said with a raised eyebrow, leaning back from the bars with a grin. “If that’s really the case, we are not so different, Barbie-Monster.”

“I am nothing like you, Mr. Joker.” Harleen snapped defensively, turning on her heal and walking towards the exit from the cell block.

“You’re just like me, Barbie-Monster, just less interesting.” He laughed at her retreating form.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Mr. Joker.” She sighed over her shoulder, her Barbie mask firmly in place. “Try not to get too many privileges revoked before then.”

“I can’t wait, Barbie Monster. You know I live for these conversations with you.” He chuckled, grinning at her white lab coat as his laugh echoed down the long concrete hall.

Once she’d left, J let himself relax back onto the cot in his cell. He couldn’t tell if it was because the drugs that they kept injecting him with, the sheer boredom of captivity, or the fact her couldn’t quite place where he’d seen the feral glaze in her eyes before- but he was curious about the good doctor.

“ _You must truly be bored if you think a person is interesting. The only thing interesting thing about her will be how we kill her_.” A distant voice growled in a voice like an earthquake.

“ _Since when does fake flirtation and pitiful attempts violence interest you? You see that most nights_.” A slightly less demonic sounding voice he once named Letcher scoffed.

“ _True, but how often do you see a doctor do it?_ ” An annoying voice named Jack volunteered.

“ _Oh please, all people with power abuse it. That’s why it’s so entertaining_.” The first, most dangerous voice laughed.

“ _Even you have to admit watching her pin him was fun.”_ Letcher purred approvingly.

“ _Violence is always fun_ ,” the dangerous voice growled, “ _but you seem to be confusing fun with interesting.”_

“It’s not her that’s interesting.” J said dismissively, shaking his head as if he could silence the trio of voices. “Barbie Monster is up to something, and I want to know what it is.” He giggled with no small degree of threat in his voice.

“Y _eah. It’s her lies that are interesting you_.” Letcher snorted.

J growled and jumped to his feet to pace his cell, wishing the voices would leave him alone. It was difficult enough to think without having to ignore their input. Barbie Monster was playing at something. He wasn’t sure what, but something was off about her. He’d suspected it since their first meeting but hadn’t thought much of it. But now that he’d seen that feral look in her eye… he had questions.

He was turning to face the far corner of his cell when he noticed a smudge on his desk. There was a fine layer of dust covering it when he arrived and, since he hadn’t been given anything to write with, he had never used it. It was a slightly triangular shape with rounded edges. There were slight lines in it, what had ever been perched on the side of his desk had been ribbed like the bottom of a shoe.

“Well, well, well.” Joker growled to himself. As if having next to no privacy wasn’t bad enough, someone had been in what little space he could claim as his own. Looking up to glare blankly at the wall, he noticed a matching scuff mark on the wall below the security camera. He wasn’t sure what exactly someone was doing standing in the corner of his room on his desk, but someone was up to no good and for once it wasn’t him.

He wasn’t sure what the good doctor had been doing in his territory, but he suspected his questionable doctor had something to do with the mysterious footprints on his desk. She’d clearly been up to something she wasn’t supposed to be.

Dr. Quinzelle’ s interaction with the guard was only a flicker, a snapshot into what she was hiding. He needed to get a message to Frost. J needed a report on what intel had been collected on his Barbie Monster as soon as possible. If he played his cards right maybe he’d have something fun to dangle in front her before their next session.

* * *

“What the are you doing, Harleen?” Harleen groaned to herself, swerving between too-slow cars on the freeway while trying to ignore her racing heart. “That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve seen you do in years.” She snarled.

How could she let herself put her hands on a coworker in front of the Joker of all people? It wasn’t like she worked in a rundown diner or pawn shop anymore, she had a real respectable job. There were rules to be followed and basic etiquette to be followed. How stupid could she possibly be? Work was one of the, if not _the_ , most important places for her to stay in control. Men pawing at her was nothing new, by now she should be immune to her instinctive violent response. Just because their unwanted touches made her want to cut their hands off didn’t mean she could act on it. She knew better. One second, she’d been patting herself on the back for getting away with hooking up the transmitter to the security camera in the Joker’s cell. The next she was being an impulsive little bitch who was too stupid to think through even the most obvious repercussions for her actions.

She wouldn’t be fighting back the anxious churning in her gut if she’d been caught by anyone else. Being caught breaking rules didn’t usually scare her, they’d never felt terribly applicable to her any way and she trusted herself to talk her way out of any consequences. Lies had always slipped comfortably from her lips. If her mother was to be believed (which in all honesty, she probably shouldn’t) her baby girl had been lying since she could speak. God knows she’d been practicing getting men to do what she wanted since she was just a teenager.

“What the fuck are you doing?” She winged, trying to swallow back the near panicked sensation in her gut. She was normally so controlled. Yes, she’d had her share of fights as a kid and still sometimes fantasized about hurting people every now and then. But all people did that. It was totally normal. Everyone’s Jungian dark side had opinions now and then. And while, yes, with enough drinks maybe she would admit hers might be more active than the average persons… she hadn’t lashed out like that in years. She was normally so good at keeping her impulses redirected.

Part of her wanted to blame the Joker and make it somehow his fault. That by somehow just having him there had made her impulsivity worse. Part of her even wondered if he enjoyed the uncontrolled, impulsive version of herself that always seemed to be bubbling just below the surface. She didn’t care about his opinion of her per say… but something about having someone who she found so interesting finding anything about her intriguing was intoxicating in its own way. She wondered if the look in his eyes after she pinned the guard was something approaching approval- not that having the Joker approve of something was good.

In fact, his approval was probably a good sign you should run away screaming. But still, she’d never met someone interested in the rotten parts of herself that she tried to hide. Even if it was just for a moment before she shoved her monster back into the closet where it belonged, having someone look at the ugly parts of herself with real interest was addictive.

“Stop it, Harleen.” She growled to herself while slowing to a stop in front of a warehouse-turned-MMA studio in the seedier side of (the already pretty damn seedy) Otisburg. Normally she was thrilled to shrug off the solemn, professional Dr. Quinzelle. It was an escape. She could tell any story about who she was, and no one cared enough to second guess it. There were no expectations, no roles to play. She didn’t have to demure to condescending old men who chronically underestimated her or have to keep proving herself competitive coworkers who kept undermining her. To the people at the gym that remembered her, she was just that hot chick who worked at that diner over in Park Row whose name started with an H or something. Only a handful of people actually bothered to remember her name and none of them had reason to ask ‘Hailey’ any follow up questions. Normally walking into the gym took a weight off her shoulders and put a wide grin on her face.

But after threatening a guard in plain sight of the Joker, the twisted expression on her face wasn’t going anywhere.

It didn’t budge when the a heavily tattooed woman with an almost impressive number of facial piercings gave her a sympathetic smile and asked her if her boss was being a dick. It didn’t budge when the same woman offered to spar with her. It got a little better when she pinned the woman. It came back when several men started cat calling them. It got worse when the first man beat her but completely disappeared when she accidentally-on-purpose hit the second man hard enough in the nose to cause a gush blood to spray across her knuckles.

“Hailey!” A voice shouted across the large room. Harleen looked up from the bloodied man underneath her and popped back to her feet, unsure if she was in trouble and if she would be able to convincingly pretend to care if she was.

“Hey, Karl!” She responded, in what she hoped was an acceptably embarrassed voice. It was hard to do when she was so distracted by the red on her hands.

“Get up here, girl.” Karl laughed back, jolting Harleen from her daze. She needed to focus. She needed to shove her rottenness back down where it belonged and keep offering it little sacrifices to keep it at bay. Though she wasn’t sure if something so fun really counted as a sacrifice. But still.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Boss Man?” Harleen giggled, jumping up on to Karl’s desk. The tall, overly muscular man turned to face her. He wasn’t unattractive, he just had nothing to offer her other than a socially acceptable place to engage in consensual violence. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, no matter how much his cocky expression communicated he thought otherwise.

“How are you doin’, girly-girl?” Karl asked, leering at her.

“I’m perfect now,” she smiled flirtatiously. God, he was so easy to play. Sometimes she wondered if he wanted her to lie to him. There was no way he could really be stupid enough to believe her.

“Is that so?” He hummed, placing a hand on her hip. “We’ll sugar, I was just looking at the books and it’s the fifth-” he began. Harleen closed her eyes and made a face of embarrassment and shame.

“I know, I know. I’m really sorry.” She sighed, “how much do I owe you?” She asked with big eyes that she tried not to blink so they would get watery and shiny. Sometimes she wondered how someone so gullible managed to run a functioning business. Well, really a glorified money laundering scheme. Same difference. But she hadn’t even asked to defer her payment the first time, she’d genuinely forgotten to pay him. It was his fault for saying he didn’t mind giving such a pretty thing like her the first month on the house. She really hadn’t meant to play with him, but he just made it so damn easy that she couldn’t resist.

“It’s $50 this month, but you got almost $400 on the books.” He said.

“Oh.” She squeaked as if she didn’t know. “I can get it, I promise.” She insisted, wishing her burning eyes would hurry up and start watering already. “It’s just that tips have been slow and rent went up again- I’ll talk to my boss. Maybe I can get an advance,” she rambled.

“Don’t worry about it, Hailey.” Karl laughed, lumbering towards her with a smirk. “No reason to get your pretty feathers all ruffled.” He ran a finger under her eye to wipe away the tear that had finally escaped her burning eyes.

“It’s not fair for me to keep asking you to do this,” she sighed in faux distress. “Give one more pay period and I’ll be able to get it for you.” She supposed she could have just paid the bill; it wasn’t as if she didn’t have the money. But it was so much more entertaining to see just how far she could push people to get what she wanted for free. Honestly, it was his fault for being so trusting. If he didn’t want to be taken advantage of, he shouldn’t make it so easy.

“It’s okay, Hailey.” He laughed resting his hands on her hips. “I’ve got enough side hustles it’s not the end of the world to let a cute little thing like you take advantage of me.”

“You are too nice to me.” She moaned, wiping away the tears from her cheeks while trying to morph her smirk into a bashful smile. “God, I look like an idiot, don’t I?”

“No, you look gorgeous.” He laughed. Harleen gritted her teeth. Damn it, she’d been playing with fire for too long with Karl. It was hardly a surprise, but it was still annoying. It wasn’t as if there was a shortage of questionable MMA gyms in Gotham for her to switch to or she could even just pay him… but this was much more fun.

“Shut up.” Harleen giggled trying to swallow back her disgust. Work had been stressful enough, the last thing she wanted was to deal with the advances of her less than observant creditor.

“Don’t worry your pretty little head about the payment for now, I’ve got a new gig that more than covers your ass for now.” He bragged.

“Oh, what are you up to?” She asked with a distracting smile.

“Don’t want to tell you too much, what you don’t know won’t hurt you.”

“Tell me!” Harleen squealed, taking the opportunity to shift out of his arms reach.

“I don’t know if I should…” He paused, clearly debating if potentially impressing her enough to get laid was worth incriminating himself.

“I promise I won’t tell.” She wheedled while moving further out of arm reach.

“Fine, let’s just say… I’ve been helping a new friend turn some goods into cash.” Harleen bit her tongue till it bled trying not to roll her eyes. Everyone knew that Karl fenced goods. The fact he thought she didn’t know that was almost insulting. She was debating if sarcastically pretending to be surprised would help or hurt her cause of leaving his office without paying her bills _and_ not having him keep touching her when he continued speaking. “-And this friend, well, I don’t want to name any names here… but let’s just say she’s got sticky fingers and nine lives.”

“You did not!” Harleen shrieked in real excitement before she could censor herself. She’d met a range of Karl’s less than savory acquaintances at the gym and they had all been run of the mill outlaw bikers not worth a second glance. But _Catwoman_ , she was exciting. The fact that Karl knew Catwoman was by far the most interesting thing about him. She was more fascinating than any of her patients- or at least, most of her patients. Clearly not the Joker, he was in his own category. Harleen silently laughed to herself, what would he think if he knew that she had a tip on the whereabouts woman currently at the top of his hit list? That would be a very interesting conversation…

“Sure did.” He bragged, interrupting her train of thought. “Anyway, enough about her. I can give you till next month to pay of your debts. If you can’t do it by then, you and I could talk about some alternate payment methods.” He purred, running a hand up her inner thigh. Harleen jumped of his desk, thoroughly broken out of her reverie, with a forced smile.

“Well, mister, let’s see what I can do about that.” She giggled, barely resisting the urge to punch him in the throat. With a smirk she sashayed out the room, trying not to sprint.

She was too busy trying to keep the disgust off her face to watch where she was going that she ended up barreling into a giant who seemed to be more muscle man not five feet from Karl’s office door.

“Watch it!” Harleen snapped. All she wanted was to go the hell home and shower Karl’s touch off her body and forget how careless she’d been.

“I umm, sorry. Is uh- is Karl in?” The man asked with a strained laugh, shifting nervously.

“You couldn’t tell?” Harleen asked without bothering to hide her exasperation. Karl had left the door to his office open while they’d been talking, and it wasn’t like they’d been whispering to each other. The awkward giant in front of her had been posted up on the wall right next to the door. Given how close he was he’d probably be able to hear everything they were saying.

“I, uh, what do you mean?” He asked in an overdone expression of confusion. Harleen looked at him curiously. She knew most of the regulars who hung around the gym and thought maybe she’d seen him a few times in the last weeks, but he’d always kept to himself.

“What’s your name?” She snapped and the strange man who’d so clearly been spying on them. Well, spying on Karl. She’d just happened to be there. It’s not as if anyone would have any interest in spying on her.

“Tuck.” He grunted awkwardly, blushing like an overgrown schoolboy and staring at the ground. The man shuffled with his hands in his pockets, drawing Harleen’s eyes to his waistband where an odd lump near his spine was barely concealed.

“Well Tuck, it’s been lovely to meet you. As we can both clearly see, Karl is very much in his office. You are an absolutely terrible liar but since I’m so, so very god damned tired I’m going to go home and go to bed and not tell him you were watching.” She sighed, rubbing her temples. She supposed that’s what Karl got for playing with the big kids like Catwoman. Whatever an armed, ripped man was doing spying on Karl wasn’t her problem. Besides, maybe if Karl got killed, she could stay at the same gym a little longer. All she wanted was some Advil, a hot shower, and a drink (ideally many, many drinks).

“Uh, yeah. Thanks.”

She’d made it all the way back to her car before remembering that her tank top still had dried blood on them from when she’d hit the man what felt like hours ago but, in reality, hadn’t even been forty-five minutes earlier. Shit. If someone in her building noticed that, it would raise questions. Being the pretty little psychologist who was _such_ an angel to work with Gotham’s problem children didn’t really fit with coming home bloody. But if she went back in, she might get tied into Karl’s mess. Looking back at the warehouse she wondered if she could duck into the locker room without being noticed. While glancing at the doorway, she noticed a figure hunching behind a car staring at her.

It was an impossibly stupid hiding place for an impossibly muscular man.

Maybe ‘Tuck’ was bailing on whatever his plans were with Karl because she’d be a witness. If she was out to threaten someone or whatever the socially awkward giant was there to do, she wouldn’t want some random lady there to see it. He was had no reason to be interested in her. She was just an institutional criminal psychiatrist. It was an intentionally uninteresting profession to the outside world that inspired unearned trust and no follow up questions.

Her gut twisted in something between anxiety and anticipation as she pulled out of the dark parking lot. She’d take the long way home and as long as she didn’t see him following her, everything would be fine. If he did, she wasn’t sure what she’d do. While she might spend a few hours each week hanging around a MMA studio, it wasn’t as if she’d had much formal training. Enthusiasm and flexibility were her primary skills, and those wouldn’t do her much good.

She didn’t see him the first two blocks and started to relax.

On the third block an old sedan that had been painted a hideous shade of olive green appeared.

No matter how abruptly or illegally she turned the sedan kept appearing in her rearview mirror.

“What the hell do you want?” Harleen growled under her breath. Her head was pounding, she just wanted to go to bed. Why the hell would he be following her? If he’d wanted to attack her, he wasn’t going to find a better place than the sketchy parking lot behind the studio.

Who the hell would want to shadow her? Her bosses wouldn’t care enough to follow her. Her friends weren’t interested in her enough to follow her. Karl thought he knew everything about her. None of her patients had the power to harass her in the outside world.

Well, that wasn’t quite true. One of them most definitely did.

“Oh, fuck.” Harleen groaned.

She knew she should be afraid. There was a big, armed man who very well may have been sent to spy on her by the most dangerous living person (not that you should call him a person to his face). Yet of all the feelings pulsing through her veins, an intoxicating cocktail of excitement, anger, and some unnamed feral sensation the growled dangerously at her, fear wasn’t one of them.

“Whadaya gonna do?” Harleen muttered to herself. She should call her boss, if not the police, to report that the Joker was likely having her followed from his cell. If he was able to give orders from his cell, he was still a danger to the city. But if she reported him, she would be taken off the case. Dr. Reed would make sure they never had contact again, which would functionally bar her from getting to play in the tangle of his mind and hear the details of what he’d done. Maybe it would have been the safer thing to do, it definitely would have been the smarter one. But he was the most interesting thing she’d ever seen, and it wasn’t like she’d let risk get in the way of her doing what she wanted before. She wouldn’t let anyone take her off the case.

If she was being followed at her gym, Joker almost certainly knew where she lived. There was no point on taking the muscle-man on a wild goose chase into remote parts of town where he could kill her with fewer witnesses. Besides, if the Joker wanted her dead, he’d do it himself. If he was having her followed it was because he curious. He wasn’t quiet as manipulative as her, but he could certainty be persuasive when he wanted to be and probably just wanted to collect leverage to control her. Of course, that had been before that afternoon when she’d gone and given him all the leverage he could possibly want.

Decision made, she gunned it back to her apartment. There was still some dried blood smeared on her tank-top that would definitely raise some eyebrows, but she didn’t want to dawdle.

“You’re playing with fire.” Harleen whispered before laughing for no particular reason she could identify. “But I always liked it hot, din’it I.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, what do you think? Is Harleen a Barbie pretending to be a Monster or a Monster pretending to be a Barbie?  
> See you next Wednesday ;)


	3. Games

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just when he was beginning to come to a conclusion on whether or not her lateness merited him murdering the most entertaining toy he had, she rushed into the room. She was still dressed in her usual generically polished professional fare, but she’d forgotten her lab coat. Her hair wasn’t its usual devastatingly boring ponytail and was instead a messy bun with loose curls that looked to be fighting their restraint.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Wednesday, everyone.  
> Trigger warning for binge drinking and stalking

Even though she had been exhausted and her head was throbbing, it had taken hours and a fistful of pills to finally get to sleep. She couldn’t turn of her goddamned mind. Every time she closed her eyes her thoughts would start screaming at her for how reckless she’d been. What the hell was she doing? Hurting a coworker in front of a witness. Threatening The Joker. Letting things with Karl get so out of hand. Allowing her morbid curiosity about The Joker overwhelm what little self-preservation she still had.

She couldn’t tell if she wanted to laugh or cry, so at some point in the night she’d split the difference and done both at the same time. Sometime around four she’d finally fallen into a fitful sleep only to be jolted awake by murky dreams of electric eyes and a gash of a red smile cackling for her to come play.

She bolted out bed, flinching away from the too loud laughter only to notice that it was far too bright out to be 6.

“Shit!” She shouted staring at the time. She was supposed to be at work in thirty minutes and the commute alone was twenty. Jumping from her bed, she all but sprinted to her closet and grabbing the first blouse and skirt her hands found.

“You’re a fucking mess.” She spat at her reflection. There was no time to tame her wavy hair into a smooth, perfect bun. She made an attempt at her makeup, but she didn’t have the time or will to hide just how dark her sleepless night left her eyes and how red her anxious chewing had left her lips.

“Try not to ruin yourself today, I know it’s hard to resist.” She snarled at her reflection that only vaguely imitated her usual subdued girl-next door style.

* * *

J refreshed the email on the phone he’d been concealing inside his mattress for the umpteenth time wondering where the hell Frost’s report was. When he got out, he was going to have to remind Frost exactly what his place was. He only had fifteen minutes before two guards would appear to chain him up and haul him off to therapy and damn it, he wanted something to play with when he saw the doctor.

He was oddly looking forward to his little meeting the Barbie Monster. If nothing else, she was entertaining. And possibly interesting. Which was a confusing concept. Other than Batsy, he hadn’t met an interesting person before.

After what seemed like the hundredth time, a new email finally appeared. J’s eyes flicked to the clock; it was a whole five minutes late. Next time he saw Frost, Frost was going to bleed. At least debating how to punish him would be something entertaining to consider for the next few days. And he'd have something to read to keep his mind occupied at night.

“Focus,” J muttered to himself. He only had a few minutes before the guards would come to take him. He could probably read the document before they got there, the reports on doctors tended to be fairly short. Usually they gave enough details of their last several days to be unnerving and a range of exploitable secrets. Doctors were too boring to merit having more than a few pages on them.

Or at least they usually were. Judging by how long the attachment was taking to download in the admittedly poor connection of his cell, Barbie’s was more robust than typical.

“Oh my, Dr. Quinzelle.” He whispered to himself, scrolling through the newly opened pages. There was no way in hell he was going to finish reading that before his session. Instead he quickly skimmed for the juiciest tidbits, hoping he’d stumble across something entertaining before the guards came to interrupt his fun.

The first page was painfully tedious as expected. Typical education, boring list of acquaintances, dull apartment in an uninteresting part of the city. She occasionally went be the alias “Hailey” but wasn’t even using it to do anything illegal- just as part of a membership at an MMA gym with more outlaw biker ties than he would have expected from her. She’d initially struck him as more of the SoulCycle type than a bare-knuckle brawler type, but after yesterday he’d changed his assessment to an upscale boutique kickboxing studio type.

He looked further down, hoping for some convenient weakness. No partner, no close friends, no pets, not even any useful debt for him to exploit. J cocked his head to the side, that was odd. He hadn’t seen a doctor her age without debt before. He scrolled to information on her family, all deceased. Had she inherited wealth?

“That would be a no.” J chucked darkly to himself, looking at the pictures of where she’d grown up. J scrolled down further looking for an explanation. But all he saw were images of her in designer clothing, a half decent car, a somewhat pricey apartment. Even in images back from college, she was dressed fairly nicely.

She had a scholarship from being on the gymnastics team, but it wouldn’t have covered her other interest and she’d quit after two years. How the hell was she affording all this? Whatever she was doing to maintain her lifestyle it wasn’t exactly being reported to the IRS. If she had been dealing, fencing goods, or turning tricks Frost’s people would have been able to figure it out. It would seem that she had some income stream outside of the classic underworld bag of tricks that was netting her a pretty penny.

J wanted to tear deeper into that section, but he glanced at the clock to see how much longer he had, five minutes. He’d have to come back to that intriguing line of questioning later.

He quickly scrolled to see if Frost had pulled off what he’d ordered him to do. He had. Good, maybe J wouldn’t kill him. The investigators had managed to get into several state hospitals to have… conversations with a handful of her former patients. J tore through those paragraphs; he had been dying to read those results for weeks. He smirked to himself as his suspicions were confirmed: all of her patients remarked that she had a nearly voyeuristic thirst for the intimate details of their violent offenses. Between her rather gruesome therapy sessions and her apparent penchant for recreational (though boringly consensual) violence, it would seem that Barbie Monster had quite the morbid curiosity for the gory details. He wasn’t surprised he was right, he was always right, but it was nice to have it confirmed.

Footsteps pulled J from his smug amusement. He quickly returned his phone to the hiding place in his mattress and sat down in his chair like it was a throne instead of an old plastic stool whose sharp edges had all been sanded smooth.

“Hello, boys.” J laughed before rolling his neck, cracking it unnecessarily loud just to watch the guards in front of him flinch. J almost cooperated, letting them restrain him without causing them any real physical harm. Not that it would stop him from grinning manically at them just to watch them try not to piss themselves. They were hilariously easy to scare. At least it meant they kept their opinions to themselves. He’d cut out the tongue of one of his old guards who was too chatty on his first visit. The two quickly ushered him to the therapy room before one left and the other went to go stand sentry in the corner until the doctor arrive.

“Sit.” The guard grunted, trying to sound tough before chaining his ankle shackles to the bolts under the table and retreating to the corner silently until the doctor arrived.

“My pleasure,” J laughed dangerously.

He sat there glaring at the wall for about ten minutes wondering just where his latest experiment was. The good doctor was a delightful enigma that was serving to entertain him in an otherwise boring asylum. However, if she kept him waiting, he might lose his patience. It would be a shame to kill a toy he’d already started to collect some interesting information on, but sometimes sacrifices had to be made. 

Just when he was beginning to come to a conclusion on whether or not her lateness merited him murdering the most entertaining toy he had, she rushed into the room. She was still dressed in her usual generically polished professional fare, but she’d forgotten her lab coat. Her hair wasn’t its usual devastatingly boring ponytail and was instead a messy bun with loose curls that looked to be fighting their restraint.

“Running a little late today? How rude Doctor,” he growled looking her up and down.

“My apologies,” she said breathlessly, pulling her clipboard from her overflowing purse.

“Take all the time you need.” He grinned dangerously wondering what had managed to get her feathers ruffled. From what he’d read, she was never seen with so much as a hair out of place. Was she really so anxious about having him seen her little display with her coworker the day before? It would be disappointing if she’d gotten so worked up about that. And here he thought someone who threatened _The Joker_ without breaking a sweat might actually be interesting.

“I think I’m all set,” she said to the guard in a forced version of her Dr. Quinzelle voice.

“Are you?” Joker laughed dangerously, cocking his head to the side.

“Yes, thank you.” She said in a clipped voice, “are you ready to begin?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that doc. I’m already feeling so much better that I think I might be cured. We should talk about you instead.” J grinned sarcastically.

“That’s not what we’re here to do.” She reprimanded firmly.

“What are you here to do, Barbie Monster?” He asked with more sincerity than he had intended. She looked at him curiously, clearly confused by the change in his voice.

“I’m here to help you.”

“Oh, please.” He scoffed, “If you’re going to lie than at least tell more interesting lies.”

“What do you mean?” She said, clearly offended.

“I mean my friends have been talking to your former patients and they didn’t think you were there to help them. In fact, they seemed to think you were motivated by a keen interest in let’s say… the gory details.” He grinned, leaning closer as if to tell her a secret.

She froze and her eyes narrowed in a disappointing near deadpan. Normally people reacted more entertainingly to his revelations. It was almost like it wasn’t even surprising to her. Which made it far less fun. He wanted to watch her squirm like every other boring person, but instead she looked somewhere between irritated and bored.

“I could have you sent to solitary for that.” She eventually said in a flat voice.

“Aw, pulling out the same threats as yesterday again? Are you really going to pretend you’re not scared?” He cooed sarcastically, unsure if he was annoyed or impressed. Mostly because he wasn’t terribly familiar with what ‘impressed’ felt like. After all, the only person he’d ever been impressed with was himself.

“Scared?” She repeated before suddenly bursting out in laughter, making J sit back in his chair. He’d never had someone laugh about him stalking them before. Whatever was interesting about his little psychiatrist went deeper than a little lust for violence and indifference to personal safety. There was something self-destructively feral in her.

“With a single word I could have you dragged from your apartment and tortured until you’re begging for me to let them kill you.” He growled, confused by her indifference and irritated by his own confusion.

“Yes, you could. But if you keep having me followed, I could have assigned a new doctor.”

“That’s your threat? How will I live without your illustrious company?” He scoffed. So, what if Arkham gave him another doctor? They were practically interchangeable, only varying in the degree he wanted them dead. So, what if Barbie Monster more fun than other doctors? Sure, there was something fascinating about the secrets she seemed to keep and talking to her wasn’t nearly as irritating as talking to most people. He would _almost_ say he enjoyed it. Not nearly as much as killing or maiming or playing, but still.

“Just think of how much more bored you’d be if you were stuck with one of my coworkers.” She sighed, interrupting his train of thought. Joker growled to himself. How dare she think she was interesting enough for him to be annoyed by not seeing her anymore. Even if _maybe_ she had a point, he should kill her for the presumption.

“So, I should be a good boy and play by the rules like you?” He scoffed trying to push away the uncomfortable twinge her words evoked.

“No, you should play by the rules.” She laughed, chuckling until she had to take off her glasses and wipe tears from her eyes.

“Don’t pretend you have any idea what it’s like to disregard the rules, little girl. You might have a little monster that you let out to play now and again, but don’t fool yourself into thinking you have intelligence or creativity to be something interesting,” he spat.

“At least I get what I want without ending up in places like this.”

“Oh, what is it you want? To get up early in a boring apartment, play politics at work, and try to convince Gotham’s problem children to play nice then go home and do it all again?”

“Hmm,” Harleen smiled, “is that what you think I do?”

“Oh, little girl, I don’t have to wonder. I know.”

“So, your Tuck doesn’t feel like reporting about the gym… or?” She shrugged. J tried to ignore the jolt of impressed surprise that coursed through his veins. Damn it. He wasn’t sure which of his goons ‘Tuck’ was, he never cared enough to learn names, but he either was a complete idiot or Harleen was shrewder than she seemed. Joker noted to himself that Frost was officially back on his ‘to-kill-list.’

“Good girl, you noticed him faster than I expected.” He growled with eyes narrowed dangerous approval. It was equal parts obnoxious and intriguing that she’d caught his spy.

“Can we start the session now are we not done with this tangent?” She laughed with a real smile on her face.

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Beyond narcissism?”

“Are you so quick to forget that you wrote that I’m a sadist in one of those pages,” He gestured with his chin to her clipboard stacked full or notes. “I’m having too much fun right now.” He crooned with a nightmarish grin.

“Which do you like better, making people squirm from mind games or physical torture?” She asked clicking her pen on.

“Are you going back to Dr. Quinzelle? How disappointing.” He sighed, waiting for her to take the bait. As the seconds ticked by and Barbie waited with her bland, expectant expression he relaxed back into his chair with an amused shrug. “Preference is a fickle thing. Torture is always amusing, psychological or physical.”

“What would you say determines your preference in the moment?”

“And why should I tell you that?” He asked mockingly.

“Because you like an audience and no one else is going to listen to you.” She quipped, her boldness surprising him. J laughed back in honest amusement before he could stop himself. He hadn’t meant to sound so sincere.

“If you think you can predict my preferences, Barbie Monster, then you truly don’t understand how chaos works.” He sighed, cracking his neck loudly.

“Fine,” she said, her face twisted in thought. “What about a specific context, for example a generic civilian who you never met versus say, Catwoman, who you have a less than amicable history with. Which would you be more inclined to do which with?”

“Hmm,” Joker paused, in deep thought. “It depends on what kind of mood I’m in. But on a normal night I where I’m not trying to make a point or play a prank, I’d probably just go for physical torture for the poor, innocent bystander. Though I can’t say their mind would come out too good on the other side, assuming I let them live of course.”

“What about Catwoman?” She pressed, scribbling notes.

“Oh, when she dies it will be slowly and she will be screaming.” Joker growled with a dangerous grin. “I’ll draw it out for days. But given she got us caught by throwing a hissy fit about my blowing up the museum, some bullshit about killing too many ‘innocent’ bystanders, I’ll probably put her in some kind of prisoner’s dilemma. Something to the effect of making her choose between blowing herself and a group of kiddies up.”

“So psychological torture for her?” Harleen asked with a raised brow.

“A little of both. Well, when I say a little, I mean a lot. But there will be both.” Harleen looked at him carefully for a moment before jotting down something else in her notes.

“Would you say that you are more interested in psychological torture when you feel like someone wronged you?” She asked thoughtfully.

“Wronged me?” J snorted, “she didn’t wrong me, Barbie Monster. She was playing a different game than me and got in my way. She’s trying to play the good guy and the villain at the same time. It’s boring.”

“You want to kill her for interfering with you fun, not for having you sent here?” Harleen asked incredulously.

“Bingo, Barbie Monster.” He smirked, watching in confusion as her face lit up at his blatant approval. J ignored the odd feeling in his gut at her face and quickly continued speaking, “I’m none too pleased about being sent here, but the primary reason she needs to die is because I hate her game.”

J spent the rest of their session looking at her curiously trying to decode what the expression on her face was. She was clearly happy that he said she was right, but he got the feeling it wasn’t just her being a teacher’s pet who loved being correct. It almost seemed as if she wanted _his_ approval. Which was disconcerting to say the least.

Back in his cell he eventually decided that there was something oddly heady about Barbie Monster craving his attention. His approval. He wasn’t sure how deep that craving went or what she’d do to feel like she was earning it, but good god imagining it was amusing. And potentially useful. His Barbie Monster had secrets well-kept enough to elude Frost, a barely explored interest in recreational violence, an impressive manipulative streak, and had the balls to threaten him. She was accomplished for a good girl, though she had only had a taste of what the world had to offer. Under the right circumstances she could explore so much more and be so, so very useful along the way.

J opened the report on her Frost had sent that morning day while trying to ignore his slight erection. It wasn’t as if he was unfamiliar was lust. He owned multiple strip clubs; objectively attractive women dressed in almost nothing surrounded him most nights. It just wasn’t interesting. Not like this was.

J’s attempts to quell his growing arousal were quickly ruined by the images Frost had attached. The spy from the day before either omitted or didn’t realize he’d been made and had sent along images of Harleen’s extracurricular activities.

No lingerie clad model or dancing stripper had ever enticed the same level of response from him as the pictures of her fighting had. Her form wasn’t particularly impressive but the near manic light in her eyes was hypnotic. He scrolled down, admiring her athletic body until he came to a picture that made him groan aloud. She was standing over someone on his knees who was clutching his nose. Her right fist was covered in blood and her skin-tight tank top had a spray of red across it. The look on her face in the picture was hard to describe. Hungry, maybe. Confident, certainly. But there was a kind of hard to define feral, childish glee in her eyes.

“Look at you, Harleen.” He groaned quietly at the next picture. She was getting into her car and her powerful legs were on display in her shorts. He could plainly see her bloody hand and red stains just below the heavy shadow of her breasts as she tucked herself into the driver’s seat. She was smirking to herself about something, what he didn’t know. He didn’t have enough blood flow to his brain to read the caption just then. He was too busy staring at the supremely confident woman in the photo and imaging what it would be like to watch her in action. He’d hadn’t even seen a sliver of her monster the other day with her coworker and he could only imagine what would happen if she truly let it out to play.

There was so much he could show her. If she thought breaking a man’s nose felt good, she wouldn’t believe how amazing half the things he did felt. She was beautiful when she let hints of her monster shine, he could only imagine what it would be like if she killed the Barbie and let the Monster consume her.

* * *

Harleen flopped face-down on the couch in her living room without bothering to take off her shoes or put down her bags. Monday felt like a small eternity ago. She hadn’t even considered going to the gym that night which was more than unusual for her, particularly on a Friday. Even if she had the energy to go fight tonight, she wouldn’t have done it. She didn’t want to deal with Karl. Or ‘Tuck’. Or whoever else might be following her. She was physically and mentally exhausted. She just wanted to burrow into her bed and never leave.

Well, that wasn’t quite true. She would get bored fairly quickly of that, she just wanted to hide away from the rest of the world. Or at least the parts of it that she didn’t like. Nothing complicated. Nothing challenging. Just the few people who she actually liked and a handful of people to con to keep herself entertained. Though, if she would be honest, she’d miss talking to The Joker (which unto itself should have been a disturbing thought). And he was certainly complicated, challenging, and absolutely nothing close to one of her usual marks. She wasn’t sure ‘like’ applied to him, the kind of panic inducing budding fascination she had with him was too complicated for something simple as ‘like.’

She wasn’t sure she’d break into a cell for someone she ‘liked’ to steal a week’s worth of extraordinarily illegally filmed CCTV footage. Whatever the right word was didn’t particularly matter- she already had the footage on a little USB stick in her purse just waiting to be seen.

With a groan, she got off the couch and dragged herself over to the kitchen. Selecting a bottle of wine, she reached for glass before changing her mind and just took the whole damn bottle to her bedroom. Normally she was meticulous about putting away her work clothes _just so_ too keep them creaseless and wrinkle free when she put them on like armor to go back to the office. Instead, she stripped down and left her clothes on a heap on the ground and fell into bed.

Getting the footage was almost too easy. Which, given that she would have to manually retrieve the footage weekly, it damn well better be easy. When she first considered bugging Joker’s cell, she had been concerned that her work and home life would be consumed by him. Now, taking a deep drink from the bottle, the idea made her almost giddy. He made the rest of her life feel boring in comparison. She would gladly lose sleep watching him.

After all, who needed sleep when it was so easy to write herself prescriptions for Adderall? Sleep was so boring compared to this.

She pulled out her laptop and began to play the footage, skipping over her completing the installation of the bug and sprinting from his cell. She watched with keen interest as he was escorted back into the cell by two guards, his hair still dripping wet and his mouth set in a firm scowl. She saw the exact moment that Joker heard her talking to the guard and the exact moment he saw her attack him. Harleen couldn’t help but flinch. God that was stupid of her to do. But what struck her more than anything was the keen interest that lit up Joker’s eyes when he saw her slip up. He went from a passive, curious observer to pressing against the bars to see more. She’d seen versions of the face he was making before on other men but hadn’t imagined in her wildest dreams that The Joker was capable of making it to. He clearly enjoyed watching her threaten a coworker.

Over the next hours she watched two days unfold, fast forwarding the dull bits and rewinding to watch the interesting ones over and over. She sped through hours of him pacing like a wild cat in a too small cage and the guards who came to check on him and deliver food and pills like clockwork. It made part of her laugh tipsily at his violent reactions to the guards predictable arrival. She wasn’t surprised to see him pocket his pills in the side of his mouth only to spit them out once the orderlies left. He was far to alert and to nimble on his feet to be taking the medications she prescribed him.

She rewatched him talking to himself over and over. There was no sound on the camera, but if she wasn’t very much mistaken, he seemed to be having a conversation. He’d never mentioned hearing voices before… While spying on him to further his therapeutic outcomes was admittedly a thin excuse for stalking her patient, at least she had one medical note-to-self that could actually be useful. Over and over the next hours she found herself whispering increasingly drastic examples of what she’d be willing to do in order to hear what he was saying. It wasn’t as if hearing him would help her peal back all his secrets, but she wanted to know everything about him. Any little hint into his mind would be priceless.

She paused the recording to look at the dissociative yet focused expression on his face when he fell into oddly still silences. The first time she saw him fall into one of his tense silences before laughing she’d found it slightly alarming, now she found it almost charming. It was an odd, unsettling quirk but it somehow suited him.

But the moments she found herself most transfixed by were after the lights of the hospital were dimmed, and Joker reclined dangerously in his bed. It was strange to see such a dangerous man in such a vulnerable position. It made her want to run her hand along his face and see what he would do. Both nights he laid there for several hours- too still to be sleeping. Eventually he would seem to relax for an hour or so before he beginning to twitch. He tossed and turned, his legs kicking at nothing. Harleen would have given anything in that moment to know what he was dreaming of. After some minutes he would spring from the bed, ready to attack and looking frantically around the room for some unseen enemy.

She wondered if she gave him something to help him sleep if he’d actually take it.

For hours afterwards he would alternate between pacing and doing push-ups at a punishing pace, unable or unwilling to return to bed. His strength was well documented, she had heard rumors that he was nearly compulsive in his exercise, but she’d never been able to independently confirm that. Now she stared at his lean, muscled body in something akin to awe.

The second morning, after several hours of violent pacing, Joker had returned to his bed for the first time since his nightmare and retrieved something from under his bed. It took her a moment to identify the object in the grainy footage but eventually realized it was a cell phone.

Harleen’s eyes narrowed. So that’s how he was communicating with the outside world. That’s how he was having her stalked. She knew she should report him, it was dangerous for him to have it… but. There wasn’t a valid ‘but,’ she knew that. But still. If she took it away, he’d just get another one. It was a weak excuse even to her ears but watching him grin manically at the phone the way he had looked at her through the bars of her cell made her stomach twist in a peculiar way. She wasn’t going to take it away from him.

The next guards to enter his cell were familiar. It was the ones who had escorted him to meet with her that morning. She pressed fast forward again and debated just turning the video off for the night. Glancing at the clock, it was only a little after midnight and it wasn’t like she had work tomorrow. Besides, there were more than a hundred of hours of footage left for her to watch. She took another pull from her bottle of wine and pressed play, promising herself she’d go to sleep soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thoughts?  
> Your comments keep me going. I'm currently editing a chapter I ABSOLUTELY hate (damn me and my choice to not deviate from 'Suicide Squad' flashbacks) and your enthusiasm makes it all worth it :)


	4. Watching You Watching Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What’s the matter with the Barbie Monster now?”  
> “I…” She began unsure what she was going to say. She knew she needed to completely retreat into Dr. Quinzelle. She knew she needed to be indifferent to his games. She knew she needed to disengage. But she didn’t want to watch the disapproving shake of his head while she did it.  
> He was dangerous and completely fucking insane, but he was fascinating and she’d never wanted anything the way she wanted him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember how I used to write utter filth? Yeah. Umm. I haven’t changed that much in the last year. But hey! I made it a whole 4 chapters. Growth.
> 
> TW for stalking, dubiously consensual voyerism, generally unhealthy views about human sexuality, and a very brief, very vague reference to implied childhood sexual abuse.

Harleen sat clicking her pen repetitively, unsure how to broach the topic she wanted to with her next patient. The whole premise of her hijacking the security camera, at least allegedly, was to gain incite to The Joker to improve therapeutic outcomes. Admittedly, she’d strayed from her original intent. She’d binged watched the footage over the weekend and gotten hardly any sleep but considered it a worthy sacrifice for her budding obsession.

The only real thing she learned that she could address in her capacity as a member of his treatment team would be his apparent auditory hallucinations and his nightmares. Given that he steadfastly refused to take any of the daily medications she prescribed him, her ability to help with the hallucinations was slim to nil. The nightmares, however, she could possibly do something about. 

She wasn’t sure if the frequency of his dreams was just his baseline or something about being in Arkham had triggered them. Either way, she wanted to know more. What she really wanted was to know what he was dreaming about but, barring that, she’d settle for getting him to consider a PRN sleeping medication. Unfortunately, she hadn’t yet figured out how to ask either question without him killing her. While the risk of him attacking her in one of their sessions was limited due to his restraints, that wouldn’t stop his spy. And it would be extraordinarily disappointing to be murdered by a random underling while she was working with the most interest individual she’d ever met.

Unfortunately, her fifteen-minute break between patients didn’t give her any new genius plans on how to ask him that she hadn’t already considered over the weekend or bounced of colleagues on Monday. He seemed to like her when she was bold, hell he seemed to like that she’d threatened him. Maybe being direct would be the best course of action? Or maybe she was just out of ideas.

“Morning, Dean,” Harleen smiled at the guard, “we’re all set here.” She turned to the folding chair where Mr. J sat staring off into the distance. “Morning, Mr. J. How was your weekend?”

“Spectacular.”

“Oh?” She prompted, sinking into her chair as if his thick sarcasm wasn’t abundantly obvious. He glared at her rather than answering. “Someone is in a snippy mood,” she eventually laughed.

“Someone is trying to get themselves killed.” He laughed back with no real venom.

“Well if you plan on killing me today, I recommend waiting a few minutes to maximize how mad you get at me first.”

“What plan are you cooking up?” He asked scornfully.

“It’s come to my attention that you’ve been having a problem that we haven’t addressed together. I want to try and find at least a temporary solution for now that would help you feel better.” She said cautiously.

“Careful now, Barbie Monster. The only problem I have is being stuck in Arkham.”

“What would you call your nightmares then?” She asked with a quirked brow. A storm cloud rolled over his face, settling in a deep scowl and thunderous eyes.

“We’re done here.”

“Not yet we’re not.” She said quickly, “I’m not going to make you talk about them if you don’t want to, but I want to give you the option of a sleep aid that might help you get through the night more comfortably.”

“My comfort is not a concern of yours.” He growled dangerously.

“Actually, it is.” She shrugged.

“Comfort is below me,” he hissed threateningly. “What dreams I do or do not have are none of your business.”

“Don’t you want to sleep through the night?”

“Stop talking, Dr. Quinzelle.”

“I’m not going to force you to take it. But I want you to have the option.”

“No.” He snarled.

“Why not?”

“I don’t answer to you.”

“You don’t need to suffer, Joker.” She pleaded, unsure why she was being so stubborn or when his comfort had become so important to her.

“You know nothing of suffering, little girl.” He growled with a twisted grin. He jumped from his seat, his ankle chains clanking loudly against the bolt on the floor that kept him from approaching her. “Get yourself dragged to the looney bin by the Bat over and over again. Have each of your doctors strap you down and put the juice to your brain until you don’t know who you are or where you’re from. Try having dreams every night where you almost remember only to wake up and have them disappear like cotton candy in water.” He shouted down at her, breathing heavily.

Harleen sat back, her faced creased in deep thought. His face was a picture of pure rage. It should have terrified her, made her press her panic button and summon the guards to sedate him. Instead she found herself almost wanting to cry. But she knew her sympathy wouldn’t be well received, if anything it would just make him angrier.

They stared at each other for a long while, both unsure what to say.

“Is that why you don’t want the sleeping pills, J?” Harleen eventually asked in a quiet voice, “so that you can still dream?”

“Keep your damn pills, Barbie Monster.” He growled, this time sounding exhausted rather than murderous. He sat back down into his chair, his eyes wandering somewhere far away. Harleen wondered what he thought about, if anything, in that moment. Did he think about his half-remembered memories? Or did he think about the doctors who took them?

“No pills, J.” She murmured, looking at him and wondering if he was too dissociative to hear her. “And no ECT either. I promise you that.” Whatever minimal benefits it had to his delusions of grandeur or depression weren’t nearly enough to outweigh that look in his eyes.

J laughed bitterly to himself without making eye contact.

“I know you don’t believe that I wouldn’t use it on you because I don’t want to hurt you,” she said quietly with a smile, “but, if nothing else, your file makes you sound way less interesting after treatments. What use are you to me if you get all boring?”

J’s eyes flicked up to her with something like baffled amusement. He looked at her a long moment before he began to laugh. Quietly at first, gradually building to a deep laugh that had his bound form teetering dangerously from the folding chair.

“That’s why I like you Doc. Your self-serving quest for amusement knows no bounds.”

“Do you really?” Harleen asked quickly before she could stop herself let alone consider what she was saying. She knew that he, in as much as he was capable, enjoyed her. But hearing him say he liked her because of her rotten, ugly parts made her freeze. She always had to hide them, but he seemed to enjoy digging them out and putting them on display. She’d never met anyone like that before.

“Don’t let it go to your head. Batsy’s still more interesting than you.” He grumbled with an irritated smile.

“That’s an impossible standard, I’ll take what I can get.” Harleen laughed, trying to suppress a massive grin that threatened to split her cheeks in two.

“And here I thought you were more ambitious than that.” He sighed in mock disappointment. Harleen almost burst out laughing. If only he knew just what her abundance of ambition had led her to do in the past and just what how she was surveilling him to get ahead.

“I’m not sure a lack of ambition is one of my problems.” She snickered without thinking, “though it doesn’t hold a candle to yours, I can’t say I’ve smuggled a phone into maximum security facility so I could work from prison before.”

Harleen resisted the urge to slap her hand over her mouth like a cartoon character as if she could force the words back into her mouth.

J froze, his absent eyebrows rising as he looked at her curiously. Shit. She could claim to know about the nightmares from the guards, but she didn’t have an excuse for that bit of information.

“How exactly do you know that about that, little monster?” He asked threateningly.

“I have my sources,” she shrugged with false indifference.

“I don’t believe that.” He purred dangerously, “I can’t think of anyone other than you who’d be willing to ignore the risk of letting me have a phone and, given that it hasn’t been confiscated, it seems you’re the only one in the know.”

“My lips are sealed, Mr. J.” She smirked, trying to ignore the soaring sensation of having anything resembling power over him. “Besides, I already told you, you’re more fun when you’re not being boring.”

J burst into laughter at that. He didn’t stop for the remaining minutes of their session. He didn’t stop when the guards came to escort him back to his cell. As Harleen walked back to her office with a small smile on her face, she could still hear his chuckles bouncing off the cement walls of the long narrow corridor.

* * *

J smirked to himself, his doctor was a delightful enigma. Book-smart enough to keep up with the big boys in Arkham, street-smart enough to pick up on his spies and phone, impulsive enough to be perpetually self-destructive, dark enough preoccupations to make her interesting, and manipulative enough to keep anyone from noticing. Except, of course, him. Which was only natural, he couldn’t expect other people to be as intelligent as him.

He considered her offer of sleeping pills. It was somewhere past midnight and sleeping would have been a welcome respite, but he couldn’t stand the idea of indulging that weakness.

He could never tell if his dreams were memories or not. His past had always been multiple choice and he’d told so many versions of it over the years and heard so many theories he wasn’t sure what was real anymore. Sometimes in his dreams he saw camouflage and guns and a foreign land. Sometimes he was very small and people much bigger than him did terrible things. Sometimes there was a man with a knife telling him to smile more. Sometimes he saw a pretty young woman and a small apartment. Sometimes he saw that young woman with a smile carved into her face. Sometimes he saw stage lights and notecards full of jokes. Sometimes he saw a gang of mismatched young men with guns and someone called the Red Hood. Sometimes he saw the broken body of a very pregnant woman in the wreckage of a car. Sometimes he was the ward of some rich man who was way too into martial arts. Sometimes he saw nothing. When he woke up the details always faded into near obscurity.

He could never remember names or places or years. He never even knew if any of them were real. He could sometimes remember shadows of feelings from those dreams. He didn’t mind the ones that made him jolt awake wanting to scream and crawl out of his skin. He hated the ones he woke up from feeling peaceful or happy. He could never remember what happened in those dreams.

While the dubiously authentic dreams might haunt him, after dozens of rounds of ECT and whatever had happened at ACE, it was all he had left. It was tempting to believe the doctor when she said that she’d really stop pushing pills. But he didn't believe her, nor did he trust that she wouldn’t eventually get so frustrated with him she’d send him off for ECT. While his mind was still his, he could accept lying awake waiting for his dreams to take him. If he was free, he’d play with whatever toy he had chained up in the hideout to quiet his mind and drink himself to sleep. None of that was an option in Arkham and as the weeks passed his exhaustion was only getting worse.

Growling in irritation at his weakness, he pulled out his phone to see if Frost or the spy whose name he’d already forgotten had sent him any updates. Not that they should have, he’d gotten the initial report just a week or so ago and had already received the follow up he demanded a few days later. Frost had seemed perplexed by J’s unusual interest in receiving frequent reports on the doctor but hadn’t asked too many questions. Which was undoubtedly his best feature and probably the only reason Joker hadn’t killed him yet.

There were about a dozen emails with updates breakout plans he’d need to make some decisions on and background information on the other insufferably boring Arkham staff he’d have to force himself to read. But, unsurprisingly, there were no new updates on the only one worth the time it would take to read the report. Which made J feel something itchy and obnoxious that made him wish he’d started something with the orderly who had delivered his dinner. It had been disgustingly long since he killed anyone and days since he’d seriously injured someone.

J put his feet up on his desk and scrolled through the update report from Friday for the umpteenth time. There really wasn’t much to see, he wasn’t sure why he kept rereading it. It would seem that his doctor went into her apartment on Friday and didn’t come out again until Monday morning. Which was unusually boring. She didn’t go meet with ‘friends,’ grocery shop, or even go fight. It was hard to imagine what she’d spent those days doing but it didn’t stop him from wondering.

His eyes were out of focus, staring at the wall blankly when it returned to the mysterious scuff mark on his wall. He smiled at it fondly, ah, one of the first signs that his doctor was more interesting than she pretended to be. Was that when she’d found his phone? J wondered absently to himself. Though if she was able to find his phone in the space of a few minutes while he was showering, and the guards hadn’t been able to find it in the many times they were in and out to restrain him for various treatments, it said something very sad about the guards.

The idea that she’d been in his cell for any length of time without himself being present made him shift uncomfortably. He wasn’t angry the way he would have been at one of the guards, it was more a disquieting feeling of confusion. What could she possibly want? The only contraband he had was the phone and a pointlessly small knife- which curiously she hadn’t found.

He traced his fingers over the scuff mark as if he could read it like brail and it would tell him the strange woman’s secrets. What the hell had she been doing? When he’d first noticed the mark, he’d been distracted by her stunt with the guard and hadn’t particularly cared what she’d been up to…

He backed up until his bed hit him at the back of his knees. He sunk slowly to sitting imagining her delicately balancing in her high-heeled shoes leaning into the wall for balance. His eyes traced up the corner of the wall and landed on the security camera.

Was she tampering with the security systems? He jolted, sitting up straight and narrowing his eyes suspiciously. That would certainly explain how she knew about his dreams, he doubted any of the guards would be willing to potentially spark his ire by telling anyone about them. He was already violent enough without their encouragement. And it would certainly explain how she knew about the phone. No one else would find out he had contact with the outside world and _not_ try and stop him. 

His face crumpled into an angry scowl. How dare the Barbie Monster spy on him. In a world where he was some combination of hated and feared by everyone, having someone pull such a bold prank on him was darkly amusing. Oh, he still wanted to strangle her for it, but he felt a furious kind of grudging respect. By all rights he should kill her, yet he found himself far too fascinated by a creature with the stones to spy on him to do it just yet.

How recklessly self-destructive and obsessive would a person have to be to even consider spying on him?

J sat back on his bed and pulled up his phone, refreshing his email again for what had to be the hundredth time to see if there was an update from either Frost or the spy whose name wasn’t important enough to learn.

“My lucky day,” he laughed to himself at the ‘new mail’ notification. Whoever the spy was, he clearly had clearly done the math and decided that more frequent updates on Harleen would contribute to his likelihood of surviving Joker’s release from Arkham. Brown nosing typically irritated J, but as the attachments downloaded, he couldn’t bring himself to care. There was nothing useful in the report. How could it be since he’d received the last one just three days before? It was really just a catalogue of her movements with pictures.

There was nothing incriminating or remotely useful but, while he would never admit it, that wasn’t why he was looking anymore.

It was fascinating watching the progression of her over the course of the day. She left for work in work in full Dr. Quinzelle costume, her dull passive mask fully in place. In the early evening she’d return to her car and her face would morph into a far less friendly, rougher looking Harleen. Harleen would then melt away as she got out of her car at the MMA studio, he didn’t have a name for whoever that woman was. But she was his favorite. Her clothes were tighter, her smiles more manipulative, her choices far more dangerous.

There was nothing remarkable about her skill level on the mat, she seemed to lose at least as often as she won. In all honesty, the set of pictures was very similar to all the other’s the spy had sent him but that didn’t stop J from enjoying the small glimpses of her monster. He especially enjoyed the ones where she was sparing with a slender woman who was about her size. In all the other pictures Harleen’s (or whoever she was) eyes had been filled with a kind of feral glee but in this one she looked almost transported. There was an ugly daze that had settled in them that J had only seen in the mirror. It looked perfect on her. If it wasn’t for the massive grin on her face, J almost would have thought Harleen hadn’t realized that the woman’s eyebrow had split and was gushing blood all over them both.

The final picture, however, made him stop in his tracks for very different reasons. It had clearly been taken some time later (presumably after Harleen had been chastised for taking things to far… again). How the spy had managed to get into what appeared to be the women’s locker room was an open question that made J briefly reconsider his earlier decision to murder the man for incompetence. Harleen was facing away from the camera looking into her locker, frozen midway through taking off her shirt. The position the camera had caught her in showed her back muscles flexing with the careless movement of undressing. There was visible blood on her shirt, but for once that wasn’t what had caught his eye.

The pace at which he’d become uncomfortably aroused was almost alarming. Her smooth skin, the curve of her left breast, the shadow of her hard nipple, the dip of her waist and flair of her hips sloping to her (mercifully still clothed) ass... He let out a groan and forced himself to close his eyes. But it was too late. The image was burned into his mind.

J growled, his eyes flickering between the picture and the security camera. He knew Dr. Quinzelle was a generically attractive woman, but seeing her like _that_ now that he knew just what kind of monster was in her… The beauty of her body was in such delicious contrast to the ugliness she went to such extremes to hide. It made him want to do things to her that just weeks ago he would have found revolting.

His balls were screaming at him to do something but the idea of the doctor seeing it and thinking she had some kind of insight into his inner workings made him want to kill someone. Probably her, if he had to guess.

His cock twitched hard in his pants, demanding attention, as if it wasn’t already abundantly aware of how badly he needed to come. Later he would blame the sedatives he kept being injected with and would claim it was his way of showing her just who was in control, who was the better spy. But in reality, when he stood and approached the camera with a dangerous grin there had been very little thought about what he was doing at all.

He perched on the desk the same way she had weeks ago with a threatening smile before reaching up and holding up his phone. He held it still in front of the lens, giving his Barbie Monster a clear look at just what he’d been admiring. After a long moment he lowered the phone and grinned at the camera it for several long seconds. Gracefully, he jumped off the desk and walked back to the bed without breaking his threatening stare.

He sunk back down to the bed, making no effort to hide just how her monster affected him. Before he could talk himself out of it, he reached for his cock and pulled it out. Her game was up, she’d been found out. He’d won, he laughed cockily to himself.

J slumped back against the cold concrete wall, slowly palming himself with a grin. His leg twitched at the surprisingly intense sensation. How long had it been since he last came? He didn’t indulge often; it must have been months before Arkham. His shaft was already painfully hard and a bead of precum glinted in the low light of the asylum.

His limited patience already frayed, he gripped himself in a tight fist and began to pump his length slowly. He could already tell he wasn’t going to last long that night, it had been far too long and the pictures of her were too fresh in his mind. Without his leave, his free hand unlocked the phone and pulled back up the picture of Harleen in the locker room.

There was undoubtedly something sick about touching himself to images of her half-dressed and unaware he was watching but J had never been accused of having a too much of a moral compass. Unbidden, he allowed his mind to wander to just what she would do to the spy if she caught him. Or better, if J provided him for her. He could just imagine her feral gaze and twisted grin…

“Fuck.” J grunted out between tightly clenched golden teeth at the image. She’d be dangerous, uninhibited, beautiful. With an almost inaudible moan, he dropped the phone next to his leg where he could still look at the image. His newly free hand migrated to his heavy balls to lightly squeeze and pull at them while his other hand continued to stroke his length. The bead of precum had grown and was now dribbling down his swollen shaft. His breath grew ragged as he fought to silence his groans, not wanting to draw the attention of the night shift.

His fantasy was evolving, changing behind his tightly closed eyes. His fantasy Harleen turned her gaze from threatening violence at the spy to him. He could just imagine her angry eyes stalking him, her anger only feeding their hunger. It was so easy to imagine her launching herself at him to hit him only for him to sidestep her and use her loss of balance to knock her to the floor. He could see himself pinning her down and biting at her neck and breast. He could almost feel her powerful legs tensing and rolling them over so her was pinning him down, holding him by the neck while grinding her perfect body against his.

J’s hand moved faster around his length at a near violent pace. His hips were bucking and jerking under his hand, desperate for more. God he could nearly feel her smooth body against his, riding him while her feral, worshipful eyes dug into his. Her round hips bucking against him while his hands harshly gripped her ass, pulling her harder and faster against him. He could almost hear her desperate whines and cries as she rode him, her wetness strangling his cock. He could almost taste her breasts that, in his mind, were jiggling temptingly in front of his lips.

Strands of sweat darkened green hair plastered themselves to his paperwhite forehead. He bit a hit lips until they bled to silence himself. It was so damn hard to stay quiet while his hands and his images of her monster drove him closer and closer to the edge. Just imaging her wild curls surrounding her head like an ironic halo and her mad eyes glinting up at him while he pounded into her made him want to growl her name.

He was successful in stifling any noises up until the very end. He was pumping himself hard and fast while massaging his balls, feeling trickles of precum slicking his palm and making a wet noise with each pass of his hand. His balls were growing tight, pulling in towards his body and his cock twitching hard when his fantasy abruptly changed. They were against a wall, her nimble legs locked around his waist while he thrusted into her hard and fast. She was begging him for more, grunting and growling viciously, her eyes completely feral. Her head was thrown back in ecstasy, screaming his name, before she abruptly lowered her face to his and kissed him hard.

“Harley,” he grunted, his eyes flying open to lock on the security camera while his cock pulsed in his hand and his seed spurted in several shots across his exposed abdomen and trickling down his fingers.

* * *

Harleen drank deeply from her bottle of wine, staring intently at the footage in front of her. Ever since The Joker had begun his incarceration at Arkham, Tuesday and Thursday when she had her 45-minute long sessions with him had become her favorite days. But she was quickly learning to appreciate Fridays. Those were the days when her contact with him wasn’t limited to a small concrete room and he wasn’t restricted in a straitjacket.

She could spend all weekend with him, watching his every move and reveling in the secret moments that only she was privy to. Canceled brunches, missed parties, late paperwork all didn’t matter. Not when she could have her weekends with him.

The hours slipped by almost unnoticed as she fell into the rhythm of his days. Waking up, furiously pacing and doing calisthenics until he looked like he would collapse. Orderlies delivering food and pills. Him spitting those pills out once their backs were turned. Him staring numbly into the distance. Him on his phone. Different orderlies delivering more food and pills. Guards attempting to restrain him. Him fighting back. Him being dragged to various therapies. Him being escorted to the shower. Him reclining in bed like a predator who knew just how deadly it was. Him eventually falling into a fitful sleep only to violently awaken hours later and return to pacing at a punishing speed.

Sometime late Saturday afternoon Harleen was losing her battle for consciousness. She’d fallen asleep here and there for brief minutes but had, for the most part, eagerly drunk in the images in front of her. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been awake for, but she knew she’d have to let herself sleep at some point. But it was so hard to justify sleep when she could watch him look at his phone so intently with such impressive focus.

She silently promised herself she’d only watch until the Wednesday morning pills were delivered, then she would sleep.

J was moving around his cell. Harleen sat up slightly, marginally more awake, her brow furrowing. That wasn’t part of his usual routine. He hadn’t had his nightmares yet. Normally he stayed in bed until those hit. With horror, she realized he was approaching the video camera. She knew that she should be terrified that she’d been caught spying on him but was too distracted by his wide, threatening smile. Suddenly his face was obscured by his phone. It took a moment for the camera to focus but it quickly became clear what he’d been looking at.

It was a picture. Of her. Shirtless. Tits out. Changing in the locker room at Karl’s gym. It was obviously from Tuesday evening. She’d been sparring with a young woman and had… gotten carried away. She ended up having to change back into her work blouse so she wouldn’t return to her apartment building covered in blood.

Harleen knew she should be horrified and angry that he had a picture of _that_. She knew she should be terrified she’d been so close to Tuck and had been completely unaware of it. Yet as J returned to his bed, sinking gracefully to sitting, she held her breath and not from fear.

The way he was sitting it was obvious that he liked the picture in more way than one.

“Oh fuck.” Harleen muttered, debating turning off the video but knowing she didn’t have the strength. The footage was grainy, but him pulling down his sweatpants to mid-thigh was unmistakable.

She wasn’t sure if this was some show of dominance or if he was trying to scare her, but if that was his goal it wasn’t working. Instead, Harleen squirmed in her bed restlessly, trying to ignore the dull pulsing between her legs. It was almost shockingly foreign to be aroused by someone.

Yes, she’d been aroused before, she was an adult after all. But arousal very rarely had to do with another person. Sex was a tool that was either used against you or you used against others. The first person to teach her that had been a gymnastics coach who’d seemed so concerned and happy to welcome her on to his team as a charity case. At first, she’d believed him. Afterwards, she promised herself that next time she would be the one who got what they wanted, not the other way around.

Whatever else her faults may be, Harleen laughed to herself, she always was a quick learner. Finding coaches, businessmen, and bankers who stared at her too long wasn’t exactly difficult but learning how to tell them a story they wanted to hear took longer. Once she learned how to do that, it was easy to get them to give her whatever she wanted. Small gains like expensive clothing and free private gymnastics lessons quickly were eclipsed by scholarships, expensive dental work, rent, and even her car.

Sex had always been a key part of her arsenal to control and manipulate. It was an amusing tool to taunt them with while she saw just how far she could push them. But the act itself had always felt like a chore. Those men were her pet projects, her toys to keep her entertained and get her things she so clearly deserved but couldn’t afford. Fucking them was the equivalent of cleaning a cat’s litter box, necessary part of owning a pet but not exactly pleasant. It wasn’t as if she never had orgasms with them. Some of the men had been good looking and some of them were even decent in bed. But pleasure was always more accidental than anything else.

But now watching the grainy footage of Joker reclined in his bed with his eyes locked on the camera and his hand wrapped around his cock she felt something else entirely. Whatever the feeling was, it was dangerous.

She lurched to sitting up-right and threw the mostly empty bottle of wine she’d been drinking the night before by the neck as hard as she could across the room. She was dimly aware of her iPad sliding off the bed with a sickening crack, but she couldn’t bring herself to care about it anymore than she could about the heap of glass where the bottle had shattered or the long cut on her palm.

What the fuck was she doing? She knew better. There was no way this would end well. She wasn’t naïve. What good could come of indulging her obsession with the Joker like this? He was a sadistic sociopath. At best.

Why she began to laugh she couldn’t say, but once she started, she couldn’t stop. Joker might be interesting. Fascinating even. He might even be attracted to her ugly parts but that wasn’t a good thing. That was a dangerous thing. But the approval of Joker- a man so free, so uninhibited, so selfish was a beautiful thing that she was loathe to walk away from.

She’d never known anyone who wanted her darkest parts. She’d never _not_ had to hide what she really was. She never expected herself to be brought to her knees for the simple admission that someone wanted her monster. Yet as she licked the length of her wound, smearing a red stain across her lips and chin, she found herself desperate for his approval, his acceptance, in a way she didn’t know she was capable of.

She knew it would utterly ruin her if she let it. And that come their next session on Tuesday she was so, so very fucked.

* * *

“Dr. Quinzelle, you’re very quiet today.” Joker purred with a smirk. He wasn’t sure how to respond to a nearly silent Barbie Monster, but he was enjoying watching her squirm. He half wondered if she’d seen the video the he’d left her over the weekend. If she’d come to retrieve her mechanism for recording footage, then she’d done a much better job of not getting caught than her first attempt.

“I apologize Mr. J,” she said distractedly. “Please, go on.”

“Oh, I don’t know that I should. I wouldn’t want to spill my guts out about my dreams to someone so distracted. We should talk about you, Doc, how are you feeling?”

“Mr. J, we’ve been over this several times. We are not here to talk about me, we are here to talk about you. Please continue with your story.” She pressed, with an insincere smile.

“Drop the professional bullshit, barbie.” He laughed, “I don’t wanna talk about me. I wanna talk about you. What did you do this weekend?” Her cheeks suddenly flamed a bright pink and a panicked look fluttered across her face. J smirked, confident she’d seen what she wasn’t supposed to. He’d been imagining her reaction for the better part of a week and couldn’t wait to see what would happen. Her apparent embarrassment caught him off guard. He’d hoped her Monster would have shown up to their appointment rather than the Barbie. “Hmm, it seems like someone got up to some fun. Tell me.”

“Mr. J, stop.” She said firmly in her most distinctly Dr. Quinzelle voice.

“Where did Barbie Monster go?” He purred in attempt to bait her into doing _something_ interesting. “Did she lose her bravery after her little game was found out? Or did she use it up on all her threats?”

“Stop asking me about myself or I will end this session early.”

“Ah, so it is Dr. Quinzelle today. And here I’d gotten my hope up you actually were interesting.” Joker snarled, he hated it when she decided to play by the rules. He couldn’t tell if he was angrier that she was being Dr. Quinzelle or angry that she’d reacted to his message by doing her best to be boring.

It was almost impossible for him to see the feral creature beating a woman till she bled on the mat in the shadows of her face. Watching her flip back and forth between Miss Goody Two Shoes and a much more interesting, much less inhibited creature disgusted him.

“It’s always Dr. Quinzelle, Mr. Joker.” Harleen said too quickly and too defensively for her words to ring true.

“You can pretend all you want. But we both know what you like, what you want. Why do you deny yourself, Dr. Quinzelle?” he growled. Generally speaking, he was angry, but it was a strange experience to be angry at someone for being a person. He’d learned long ago the people were disappointingly weak and hadn’t held that against them. Sure he’d killed them for it, but it hadn’t made him angry like this.

“I don’t- that’s not-” She began before he cut her off.

“-don’t lie to me.” He chided with a cruelly raised eyebrow, “either tell the truth or keep that pretty little mouth shut.” J laughed at her chagrined expression. “Don’t be embarrassed, I’d be speechless to if I had to defend wasting a perfect mind and moral compass like yours.”

If looks could kill J would have been dead several times over from her glare but instead it just made him laugh harder. “Don’t you want freedom?” He purred angrily, “to do what you want, when you want?”

“I’m free!” Harleen protested loudly. J laughed bitterly, sometimes he truly thought she understood the game, his world. But other times, like when she would absurdly claim that _this_ was freedom he would be stunned with her ignorance.

“No. You play by their rules and ogle the people who knew it was more fun to face the consequences of living on their own terms than play everyone else’s game.” Not that he was comparing himself to the other inmates of the prison, they were so much less interesting they didn’t merit consideration let alone comparison. But at least they knew a moment of freedom in surrendering to their worst, most amusing impulses.

“I chose which play rules to play by to get what I want.” She growled back, leaning forward dangerously. J bit back the urge to scream at her. Yes- she played with people, broke some rules, got a little carried away with her violent fun now and then. But how she considered that having true freedom to get what she wanted was beyond him.

“Really? And what is that?” He demanded. Harleen leaned back in her chair, her expression vacant. At her silence, J scoffed and shook his head sadly. He didn’t mean to speak the next words that escaped his lips but found himself as powerless to stop them as he was to stop himself from mourning their truth. “You’ve been pretending you’re one of them for so long, I almost wonder if you know how to do anything else. So disappointing, you could have been so much more.”

* * *

Harleen tried to ignore the flicker of defensive anger that passed through her. What did it matter if the only person who approved of her shameful parts thought she was disappointing? That was a good thing. It meant she was doing a good job suppressing those ugly parts.

The part of her that liked his approval wasn’t one to be encouraged. That was the part of her to be buried deep down and ignored for as long as possible. That part was to be redirected to consensual fights in dark gyms in Gotham’s underbelly and on silly little con jobs like with Karl. That part was never supposed to show in her real life.

“I’m sorry you find me disappointing, Mr. Joker.” Harleen responded in a clipped tone before she could stop herself.

“Oh, did I hurt your feelings, Harleen?” He asked mockingly, leaning forward with a sneer. Harleen froze, he’d hadn’t called her that before. An unfamiliar jolt of _something_ rushed through her body leaving her feeling slightly lightheaded. She was dimly aware she’d been quiet for too long, that she should have said something. If she’d been smart, she would have said something else professional and shut down whatever bizarre obsession the non-man in front of her had seemed to have in her. But for whatever reason she couldn’t force the words out of her mouth.

“Where did you go, Harleen?” He murmured dangerously, his eyes glinting with something unfamiliar and threatening. “What’s the matter with the Barbie Monster now?”

“I…” She began unsure what she was going to say. She knew she needed to completely retreat into Dr. Quinzelle. She knew she needed to be indifferent to his games. She knew she needed to disengage. But she didn’t want to watch the disapproving shake of his head while she did it.

He was dangerous and completely fucking insane, but he was fascinating and she’d never wanted anything the way she wanted him before.

Suddenly it occurred to her that what she was feeling was fear. It had been a long time since she was truly afraid. But now sitting in front of the most dangerous man alive she found herself terrified. Not that he would hurt her, she was fairly certain that was inevitable and there was no sense in being afraid of something that was going to happen no matter what she did. She was terrified he had seen through her act and was disappointed what he saw.

“I’ll see you on Thursday, Joker.” She said with no further comment, standing abruptly and leaving without a backwards glance. Harleen barreled out of the interview room, not bothering to stop while telling the guards that the inmate was ready to be escorted back to his cell. She marched back to her office with her bitchiest “don’t you dare stop to ask me a stupid question” glare that was in such stark contrast to her usual agreeable smile.

As soon as she reached her office, Harleen locked the door and sank to the floor leaning against the wall.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” She muttered to herself. She could feel the panic rising up and threatening to drown her. She knew better than to want someone’s approval. Either they abused that need to get what they wanted or being what they wanted was so painfully dull from you that it would kill you to do it. There was no point in giving anyone what they wanted unless she got what she got something from it. That lesson had been burned into her psyche young and wasn’t one she was prone to forgetting. 

And it wasn’t as if The Joker had anything to offer her. He was a temporary visitor in Arkham until he eventually somehow escaped, likely killing her in the process. She never got so tangled up in other people. She knew better than that. Yes, he was fascinating, magnetic even. Maybe she was even jealous of the freedom he had, how he did whatever he wanted when he wanted without hiding behind a mask.

Fighting a wave of nausea, she put her head between her knees and tried to slow her breathing. What was she doing? She had worked for so long to build this life for herself. She loved her life. Her job was interesting, damn it. Her friends were as interesting as she could expect them to be. Her apartment was luxurious, especially compared to the places she’d lived before. She was doing so well at suppressing and redirecting the ugliest parts of herself. It had been years since anyone saw them and they had always been met with disgust. Now she was crumbling just because someone saw those parts and for a moment she’d mistakenly thought they liked them?

Pathetic.

Her phone beeped, reminding her of her next appointment in thirty minutes. She took a deep breath and pulled out her phone to silence the reminder and check her reflection. God, she looked wrong. She was flushed and far to emotive. Far too out of control. Normally it was so easy to pick what she wanted her face to say and hide the rest, but she could hardly return her face to a passive neutral.

She stood and walked numbly to her desk where she’d left some cosmetics in case she ever had to shower at work. One of her first patients at Arkham had the delightful habit of urinating on people who irritated him. By the end of her first week she had a small wardrobe stashed in her office just in case. She never would have imagined using the stash to try and paint herself back to neutral after meeting with The Joker left her shaken to her core.

Her makeup reapplied and her face rearranged into a semblance of innocent friendliness. She was used to her face and words saying one thing but meaning another. Almost everything fun involved some degree of lies. But she wasn’t used to feeling so… unstable. She’d made her own way other people’s opinions be damned since she was a scrawny charity case on her local YMCA’s gymnastics team. Suddenly finding herself desperate for the approval of the one man most dangerously unsuited to it was almost painfully ironic. It would have made her laugh if she’d let it, but she didn’t want her mascara to run and ruin her polished façade. Trying to ignore her shaking hands, she put away her makeup and collected her things.

Time to go be Dr. Quinzelle, the sweet doctor who no one second guessed. She couldn't afford to be anything else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PSA from your friendly neighborhood fanfic writer- don’t take pictures of people without consent. That’s not ok. Especially if they are in any state of undress. That is seriously fucked up. This is a story in which the main characters are not ok and are both seriously fucked up. Do not try that at home. Actually, lets broaden that to literally anything in this story. Everything here is a bad idea. Do not try any of this at home.


	5. Gift

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Are you tryna control me?” She asked point blank, no humor or fear in her eyes. J was taken aback.  
> Control sounded impossibly boring. Manipulate, maybe. Yes, he wanted to convince her to help him break out. But control? He controlled everyone else around them, they were tediously predictable little ants he killed when they got dull. There was nothing boring about Harleen when she decided to show her teeth, she was impulsively self-destructive and utterly reckless. Controlling her would ruin their fun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was a bitch and a half to write, I’m still not sure I’m totally happy with it but I think we got to where we needed to go. Also, heads up… a portion of this chapter isn’t safe for work. Proceed at your own risk.  
> TW for stimulant (Adderall) abuse

Two weeks. It had been a whole fourteen days since he’d seen his favorite experiment. Admittedly the first seven hadn’t been her fault. The powers that be had put him in solitary after he attacked the guards who had attempted to deliver him back to his cell after Dr. Quinzelle had abruptly chosen to end their appointment.

He normally hated solitary, there was no one to play with and it always made his voices too loud. But this time it was a welcome break from the good doctor who was clearly fucking with his head more than he’d appreciated. It took several days to even begin to clear his mind. The whole scenario and the flimsy excuses he crafted for what he’d done on camera about manipulating her monster or trying to scare her made him laugh hysterically. Hilariously, that footage was probably the most honest he’d ever been with her. The truth was simple as it was confounding: he wanted her monster.

Harleen had gone and rewarded his honesty by hiding behind Dr. Quinzelle and walking out on him. It made him furious. Nauseas. He couldn’t tell if he was angrier at her reaction or at himself for letting himself become so interested in her. Either way, it was becoming clearer and clearer that he needed to get the fuck out of there. He’d already lowered himself to something as human as being interested in, let alone attracted to, someone. He didn’t want to see what came after that.

J knew he needed to get as far away from her as possible. But the only person he could think of leveraging to help break him out was exactly the person he couldn’t trust himself to be around. And she was the only person with the nerve to avoid him.

The first week of separation might have been his own doing, but once he’d been returned to his normal cell, the next seven days had been all hers. While she’d claimed to be sick the last two times that they were supposed to meet, his spy had reported that she’d been at her gym both days. In the pictures he’d seen she from those days looked exhausted, furious, vicious, and fucking beautiful. He stopped looking at those pictures after a few days. They weren’t helping his efforts to remain detached from her.

When she canceled their Tuesday appointment, her lies amused him as much as they angered him. When she canceled their Thursday appointment, however, he’d utterly destroyed his cell in a blind rage. He’d started by throwing his bookshelf across the room, full of pointless workbooks he and Harleen both knew he’d never open. Then he’d climbed onto his desk and torn the security camera out of the wall before smashing it to tiny pieces using his chair as a hammer. His voices roared about his weakness until his head was pounding which only added to his furry. By the time he’d finally exhausted himself, the only piece of furniture that remained intact was his bed.

There wasn’t a damned reason for her to stop their meetings like she had, he thought to himself while pacing the length of his ruined cell. As far as he could tell she was the only person other than his dearest toy, Batsy, who wasn’t scared of him. She’d obviously found him interesting. Which was unsurprising- he was by far the most interesting thing in Gotham. Hell, she enjoyed their sessions. She actually wanted him to like her, for him to approve of her.

He’d only been mocking her when he said that he’d hurt her feelings, maybe that was closer to accurate than he’d initially believed. Which made hilariously little sense.

Joker sat down with a sigh and pulled up his files about Harleen on his contraband phone for what seemed like the hundredth time. If his doctor wouldn’t come back on her own, he’d have to coerce her. He wasn’t sure what the protocol was for making someone whose ‘feelings’ you hurt get over it, but he was fairly confident threatening her wouldn’t work. Which was probably for the best, her lack of intimate relationships and utter disregard for personal well-being made crafting any serious threats very difficult.

He’d never tried to just lure to someone without threats before- but he’d also never met anyone quite like his Barbie Monster. She didn’t particularly need anything that she couldn’t easily talk her way into getting. She didn’t even have any illicit or expensive hobbies. In fact, the only thing she seemed to do other than work anymore was sneak off to the gym to fight.

Reluctantly he scrolled to the bottom of the initial report he’d gotten on her while trying to ignore the pictures of her on the sparing mat. All the other reports were strategically useless compilations of pictures and timelines of her movements. Joker felt a twinge of anger, irritated he’d stooped low enough to order pointless reports on her just to gawk at her monster. He’d never even managed to finish reading the first report, he’d always gotten too distracted by the pictures.

He slowed his rapid scrolling once he reached the boring pictures and text he had always scrolled past. Judging by her outfit and the feral smirk on her face she was still at the gym. She was talking to a man covered in gang tattoos in a cheap looking office. Her face was twisted into a prettily pathetic expression that immediately made Joker suspicious. The spy apparently didn’t think to transcribe their conversation and had only written “ _gym owner & target: overdue membership fees”_ under the picture. Joker smirked, she had more than enough money to pay gym fees- if she wasn’t paying him it was part of some game.

He was going to kill the goon Frost had sent to tail Harleen once he got out of Arkham for not bothering to write down the undoubtedly amusing explanation Harleen had given. And probably also Frost for picking such an idiot.

The next picture showed Harleen’s theatrically sad face transformed into a seductive smile that just barely masked her irritation. The image of the owner’s hands grabbing her waist and touching her face made want to cut those hands off and force feed them to the man. J growled; he could guess the kind of payment the owner was suggesting.

J found himself oddly angry looking at the pictures. Being angry wasn’t exactly unusual for him, though why looking at pictures of Harleen sweet talking her way to getting to use the gym for free made him want to kill someone was perplexing. Though judging by the look in her eye and the way she reacted to being touched by the guard several weeks ago he could only imagine that she hated it almost as much as he did.

“ _Fuck what she wants, all we need is her compliant. She’s no use to the breakout if she isn’t talking to us_ ,” his dangerous voice reprimanded him, forcing J to refocus on the problem at hand.

Maybe he could use that angle to smooth things over between them, he wondered absently. She was clearly playing around to get to use the gym for free and it looked like she wasn’t enjoying some of the side effects of the game. Since she was _so_ wounded that he was disappointed in her for acting like Dr. Quinzelle, maybe a gift for her monster would patch things up. And it might even make her happy which wasn’t the goal, but he somehow found himself wanting it anyway

“ _Since when do you care about anyone being happy? That’s not even a side benefit, if anything the only bonus to your plan is that the gym owner then won’t have an excuse to touch our toy.”_ Letcher purred angrily.

J laughed to himself quietly. That particular voice very rarely made good points. But if he saw another picture of the owner touching her, he may have to order his spy to kill the man.

Hopefully the spy wouldn’t also be too useless for that.

* * *

“Hailey, get up here.” Karl barked from the door of his office. Harleen sighed, stepping off the sparing matt and pulling a sweatshirt over her sports bra. She’d been dodging Karl for weeks and it was getting difficult to avoid him. It would be easy enough to just fuck him or leave the gym, but she wasn’t particularly inclined to do either. She pulled her sweaty hair that had fallen out of a ponytail back into a messy bun with a barely suppressed scowl and marched over to his office.

“What Karl?” She asked without making any effort to disguise her exasperation.

“It’s just your lucky day isn’t it, princess?” Karl grunted from his desk. Harleen resisted the urge to roll her eyes, lucky wasn’t the word she would have chosen.

“How so?”

“Your debts were all paid off this morning.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Daddy came and paid off his little girl’s bills. I never saw you as the sugar-baby type, but guess I was wrong about that.” He said without bothering to hide his anger.

“I don’t have a ‘daddy,’” Harleen cringed in disgust, as if she’d let anyone think they had control over her. If someone was going to give her gifts it was because she’d tricked them into it. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Well, princess, I don’t know what you want to call him, but your man came and paid off your debt and pre-paid the rest of your bills for the year.”

“What did he look like?” She demanded in confusion. Who the hell would pay off her bills? No one from her real life knew she fought for fun and no one from the gym knew she owed Karl money (or would care if they did).

“Don’t know.”

“Karl, please-” She began angrily.

“Fine, fine, fine. Don’t get your panties in a twist. Thirties, ‘roided out, tall, cleanly shaven. He joined a month or two ago, I think his name was Puck or something…” He grumbled angrily.

“Tuck?” She asked in a hollow voice.

“Yeah that was it.” Karl grunted, leaning against the door. The blood drained from Harleen’s face and she clutched the side of Karl’s desk to keep from sinking to her knees.

“Excuse me.” She said numbly before turning and walking stiffly from his office. Karl attempted to grab her arm, but she shoved past him without a second glance. She could vaguely hear him yelling something after her, but she couldn’t hear him over the roar of her pulse.

“Hailey? Where you going? Hey! What about your car? Hailey!” He called in what might have been a concerned tone, but she didn’t answer. Truth be told she didn’t know where she was going. She just needed to get away. There wasn’t a place she could go to escape the Joker or his underlings, but she kept walking.

“I don’t need his help!” She muttered under her breath over and over while stomping in no particular direction. She was handling things with Karl just fine; she didn’t need the Joker’s fucking help. He wasn’t going to fool her into thinking he was doing something nice for her. People weren’t nice unless they got something out of it.

As the sun began to set behind the Gotham skyline and streetlights came on, she found her way to a subway stop was calculating the ungodly number of stops and transfers it would take for her to get back to her abandoned car in Otisburg. It was hard for her to focus, she kept miscounting the number of stops or ending up at the end of the wrong line. She was too busy being torn between fury at The Joker for trying to buy her favor and fury at herself that, for at least parts of her, it was working.

“You like him buying you off, are you fucking insane, Harleen?” She growled at her reflection on the glass-covered subway map. For reasons she couldn’t really articulate she abruptly slapped herself across the face as hard as she could. “Since when are you this God damned stupid, you know better than to let anyone control you.”

“Are you ok, dear?” A startled looking older woman leaning heavily on a cane in one hand and holding several grocery bags in the other asked. Harleen jerked back violently staring at the woman like she’d pulled a gun on her rather than ask her a simple question.

“I just wanted to make sure you’re ok, I’m not going to hurt you,” the grandmotherly woman asked with a soft voice and hands raised placatingly.

“Everyone says that.” Harleen laughed, squeezing her eyes shut.

“Everyone says what, dear?”

“They’ll hurt you if you them, Harleen. You know better than to let them.” Harleen muttered angrily.

“Is there someone I can call for you?” The old woman asked looking seriously concerned.

“You know better than to let them, Harleen.” She repeated over and over in a panic before bolting away, knocking the elderly woman to the ground with a sickening thud in her haste. Harleen broke into a full sprint away from the subway station in the vague direction of her Robbinsville apartment and didn’t look back.

“They always want to help us.” She muttered under her panting breaths. “You want his help? You know better, you stupid little girl.” She laughed loudly. Her laughs grew deeper and louder until she could barely breathe. Her legs buckled underneath her sending her crashing to the ground on her hands and knees in an alley way.

“We don’t need help.” She giggled pushing her hair back behind her ears with her skinned hands, rubbing blood across her cheeks. “We don’t need help.” She singsonged to herself with a nearly hysterical smile.

Something about the idea of the Joker helping her struck her as funny. No one would believe her if she told them that the Clown Prince of Crime had paid her debts to get out of sleeping with the gym owner. Not that she would have done it, well at least not anymore, but the Joker didn’t know that. And he intervened. Was he jealous, she wondered with a near manic grin?

Harleen began to giggle uncontrollably. He could have threatened her or destroyed her apartment or hurt her to get her to come back to meeting with him but instead he’d given her a present. The idea of such a dangerous (not-a-)man paying off her illicit debts sparked something hungry in her.

Oh, she was furious he was trying to buy her off. But it also made her feel powerful in a way she only felt while manipulating people into giving her what she wanted and in brief flashes on the sparing mat.

Harleen felt a grin split across her face while she rose to kneeling. The Joker could dangle all the pretty shiny things in front of her he wanted, but she could take it or leave it. He wasn’t going to trick her into thinking he was just trying to help, that he wasn’t going to hurt her. He was only ‘helping’ because he wanted something from her.

“He needs somthin’ from us.” She giggled madly, reveling in the power having of something The Joker wanted. “Give it t’him or not, we get t’decide.” She giggled to herself, anger still flaring in her eyes but her lips morphing into a dazed smirk. Harleen slowly rose to standing, her temper temporarily blinding her to the scrapes and bruises covering her legs.

She stormed the rest of the way home with a furious grin on her lips and a dangerous glint in her eyes that kept other would-be good Samaritans out for a Friday night stroll from approaching the young, bloodied woman.

* * *

Joker smirked to himself, waiting impatiently to see his doctor. It would seem his gift had worked. He didn’t normally see her on Mondays, yet there he was. All strapped down and waiting for the good doctor to grace him with her presence. He couldn’t wait to see her reaction. He wasn’t sure what it would be exactly, but he could just imagine her the push and pull of her dual selves while she pretended not to like having the Clown Prince of Crime paying off her illicit debts.

He was far away, reminding himself all the reasons he needed to stay detached from his twisted experiment when the alarm announcing the opening door blared. He was restrained facing away from the door, but he could hear the surprisingly aggressive taps of her heeled shoes echoing through the room.

Normally she greeted him with some blandly professional comment but instead this time she didn’t bother to acknowledge him.

“Get out.” She spat at the guard while all but throwing her clipboard and notebook onto the table. J raised a confused, naked eyebrow, what the hell had gotten into his curiously pissed off doctor?

“Yes, Doctor.” The man huffed, clearly offended.

“Thank you.” She said patronizingly, sitting back down primly in her chair.

“Good morning Dr. Quinzelle, are you feeling better?” He purred dangerously, daring her to lie to him about her feigned illness.

Harleen didn’t respond, she just sat glaring levelly at him.

“My goodness, Doctor Quinzelle,” he said mockingly, after it became clear she wasn’t going to respond. “Was it something I said?”

“Do ya think your creative, Mistah Joker?” She eventually asked in an angry monotone.

“Oh my, you’re not even going to use your Dr. Quinzelle voice? I’m so flattered that I’ll pretend you didn’t just call me that.” He crooned sarcastically. At least she wasn’t acting like Dr. Quinzelle the way she had last time he’d seen her.

“To answer your question- extremely. Why?” He laughed with a smirk; he’d take her confounding emotions over her boring play acting any day.

“I had the situation undah control. Do ya know how many times I’ve pulled that particulah trick? I’ve played men much more intelligent and much more powerful than Karl. I don’t need or want ya help Mr. Joker.”

“I thought you’d appreciate the gift,” he shrugged with a smile, filing her admission away for later consideration. “Is the little monster mad I took her toy away from her?” He laughed, trying to wrap his mind around her little temper tantrum.

He could already feel his two weeks of practiced detachment slipping as it always did around her, she made it so fucking hard not to be curious about her. And curiosity always lead to interest. Interest lead to desire. Desire lead to him loosing himself in her monster.

“Do you think givin’ me a little present is really gonna convince me that you aren’t gonna hurt me? Do ya have any idea how many times I’ve played that game?” She snarled, raking her hands through her frizzing hair. J noted large scabs on her palms that made his missing eyebrows quirk curiously, what the hell had she done to herself?

“Oh Harleen, I would never try to convince you of that. We both know I will.” He chuckled, wondering what the slightly uncomfortable feeling his words caused in his gut was. For some reason, his words made a strange laugh bubble from her lips. J squeezed his fists within the straight jacket, as if he could physically stop himself from being interested in her perplexing reactions.

“If ya aren’t tryna play me, what did ya give it to me for?” She demanded, the angry lines on her face relaxing marginally.

“I was only trying to support your more entertaining interests. You said it yourself, you like me better when I’m not being boring. That goes both ways, you know how much I like your monster.” He purred with narrowed eyes, trying to keep himself from responding to the angry voices that berated him for mentioning what she’d seen on her cameras three weeks ago that had started their fight to begin with. 

“Don’t pretend to know or be intera’sted in what I want.”

“Oh, I’m fascinated by you want, Harleen, I just don’t know why you’re still fighting it.”

“Fightin’ what?” She demanded, intentionally not making eye contact with him.

“Don’t play dumb with me, little girl.” He purred, actively ignoring the voices screaming the consequences of actions at him. “You’ll never win against yourself. You can pretend all you want with everyone else- but we both know you can’t fool me. You loved the video. You loved my present. You love that The Joker is helping feed your monster. We both know what you want, what you are.”

She let out a deep sigh without giving any indication that she was still listening.

“Look at me.” He demanded dangerously. His voices were screaming at him, demanding that he shut up and let the doctor storm out the room. But he also knew that if he hadn’t been chained to the ground he would have walked over and grabbed her by the jaw and forced her to face him.

“Harleen Quinzelle, look at me.” He repeated, hating himself for how human he sounded and hating her for ignoring his orders. He was breaking every single rule and acting for more human than he could cope with. But the monster that hid just below her mask threatened to arouse a near violent obsession that he wasn’t at all in control off.

“Harley.”

Her head snapped up at that word and her vacant eyes latched on his. Any lectures on chaos or power or madness died on his lips. Her eyes were shiny and big and the feral glaze he’d had glimpses of was burning brighter than he’d seen before. It was fragile and desperate and violent and damn near perfection.

“There you are,” he finally managed to purr, “good girl.”

“Whadya want?” She demanded softly looking like if he said the wrong words, she’d either kill him or shatter into a million pieces. He didn’t know which one he preferred.

“Many things.” He said evasively trying to ignore his discomfort with her penetrating gaze.

“Whadya want from me?” She demanded, standing up and walking around the table to stand right in front of him so close that he could feel her body heat radiating on his legs.

“Many, many things.” He began before cutting himself off with a growl.

“Are you tryna control me?” She asked point blank, no humor or fear in her eyes. J was taken aback.

Control sounded impossibly boring. Manipulate, maybe. Yes, he wanted to convince her to help him break out. But control? He controlled everyone else around them, they were tediously predictable little ants he killed when they got dull. There was nothing boring about Harleen when she decided to show her teeth, she was impulsively self-destructive and utterly reckless. Controlling her would ruin their game.

“What fun would controlling you be, Harley? I want you to run wild and tear the world apart.” He smiled dangerously, making a fragile grin spread across her face. For the first time since she entered the interview room she seemed to relax, making an odd and unwelcome rush of relief flood J that his voices mocked him for.

“So what, you paid Karl just to keep me going back for more? Or did you just want more pictures?” She snarked, clearly not really angry anymore.

“Those are just a side benefit,” he laughed darkly. “Are you still going to pretend not to like that, or have you finally decided to put Barbie away, little monster?”

“No, I…” She paused, her face going oddly blank before morphing into an almost disturbing smirk. “I like it.”

“Good girl.” He breathed, trying desperately to ignore his voices screaming at in a blurry haze of sound. Each one shouted different suggestions that made it impossible to understand any single voice.

“Whatdya want from me?” She asked again with a dangerous glint to her eyes.

He knew he should be demanding her show some feet of loyalty, but she wasn’t ready. She could barely admit that she liked that he wanted her. Her obsession, her monster, was there but he could tell just how fragile she was. She was teetering somewhere between Harleen and someone else entirely and needed more convincing to fall the way he wanted.

Or at least that was what he told himself later that night while justifying what he demanded from her.

“I want you to rearrange your schedule to do a full fifty-minute session with me every weekday.”

“What?” She asked looking utterly shocked.

“You know you want to, Harley.”

“What I want isn’t the problem here,” she laughed bitterly, “I would have proposed daily sessions when you were first admitted if I thought the board of trustees would approve funding for it.”

“Since when do you take no for an answer, little monster?” He chided. “We both know how convincing you can be when you want to be. After all, you need a new game now that your game at the gym is over.”

“That was different.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve never used your talents on a coworker. We both know that’s a lie.” He laughed with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

“Not like this... well, at least not in a long time.”

“I thought you said you picked which rules to follow, or were you lying to me?” J sighed in an overdone display of disappointment, enjoying the confusion twisting her features. Her face became pinched and focused while she paused for a moment to think.

“I _might_ be able to sell it as an intensive therapeutic program to exploit a major breakthrough.” She paused, clearly debating something before grinning at him dangerously. “But _if_ I do this, _if_ I can convince them to let me, you’ll need you to give me something to work with.” She demanded, her eyes flashing at him

“Ooh, the little monster wants to bargain?” He grinned dangerously. Maybe she was closer to her monster than her barbie than he’d realized, he wondered absently. No one else was insane enough to try and make a deal with the devil when he demanded something of them. “I think that can be arranged, Harley.”

* * *

Doctor Reed was not easy to convince. In fact, he seemed to think Harleen had lost her fucking mind. He kept insisting she was wasting her time, going to get herself killed, and being too damn stubborn to admit that she just needed to restart the ECT. It took an hour of pleading, well over a dozen peer reviewed articles sent to support her new therapeutic protocol, and a forty-page proposal that she pulled two all-nighters in a row to complete. She wrote those pages on her laptop, tossing back Adderall like tic-tac’s, while her iPad played weeks old footage of the Joker she’d recorded on her no-longer hidden camera in a macabre parody of domestic bliss.

She wasn’t sure how many times she’d watched the old recordings and she preferred it that way. She didn’t need a number pointing out her ever-growing obsession. In someway she mourned the lack of new footage, between avoiding him and him being sent to solitary there hadn’t been the opportunity for her to get her USB stick. Then he had to go destroy several items of furniture in his cell including his security camera. It was probably for the best, she conceded. She would never be able to get the proposal done in a single weekend if she’d been distracted by new footage.

That didn’t mean she was happy about it though.

No one had ever absorbed so much of her thoughts before. Her asexual obsession with his fascinating and twisted mind had transformed before her eyes, shifting from a dark academic preoccupation to some sick craving for his approval and now to something else altogether.

She wasn’t sure what it was, but it made left her staring at the one file she’d promised herself she wouldn’t open. Every time she was about to give in something would stop her from pressing her finger to the screen. Perhaps it was some vestigial shame for abusing her authority (though she was pretty sure the last time she felt guilty she was still wearing training bras and her Lisa Frank pencil box was her most prized possession). She could call it shame or guilt all she wanted, package it up with a bow like some pretty accessory Dr. Quinzelle would wear, but she knew it was a lie.

It was fear. Before J had arrived at Arkham, it had been years since she’d truly feared anything. The fact that the one time she’d found herself craving the attentions of a man he was a dangerous creature who was having her stalked from within a maximum-security asylum made her panic. Then he went and to buy her off with a gift like so many other men she’d known. She should be furious at him; she should hate him.

But as soon as he made it clear that had no interest in controlling the rotten parts of her that he so obviously craved, she would crumble. Every time.

“Thought you weren’t ‘friad of nothin’ girly-girl?” She muttered to herself, during her umpteenth coffee break of her third day of writing. Or at least she was pretty sure it was the third day; it was hard to be sure. Time had been reduced to bathroom and stimulant breaks since Dr. Reed had given her the reluctant go-ahead to write the proposal on Friday.

To be honest, the proposal was as good as it was going to get but she couldn’t stop anxiously rereading it. She couldn’t put it down, scared she’d left something out or made some error that would lead to the board rejecting her proposal and her opportunity to see _him_ every day would vanish. With a yawn she settled back on the couch attempting to ignore the side effect of the entirely inadvisable number of stimulants she’d consumed since Friday.

“It’s not nothing, he could destroy everything you’ve built.” Harleen responded while tossing back a few small pills with shaking hands, she was wasn’t sure who she was talking to. She wasn’t one to talk to herself and was slightly concerned just how badly exhaustion was affecting her if she’d suddenly picked up the habit in the last week.

“Yeah, ‘caus we weren’t gonna wreck that all by our lonesome.” She snorted, cracking her neck loudly and setting her laptop to the side and staring blankly at her iPad where a recording of the most interesting person she’d ever met who wanted her for all the ugly parts she tried so hard to hide was sleeping. It was terrifying as it was intoxicating.

“Stop pretendin’, princess. Nobody’s evah wanted you like this and you ain’t nevah wanted nobody like this neither. No sense in bein’ afraid of facts.” She giggled, unsure if she’d said the words aloud or just thought them. Harleen picked up the iPad in a dull haze, closing the recording of the sleeping Joker and scrolling through her recordings. She knew what she was looking for even though she’d sworn she wouldn’t.

She knew wanted to watch it. She knew it was dangerous and stupid- but since when she let any of those things get in the way of getting what she wanted? She’d done far worse for much less.

“It’s like he said, ya both know what ya are. No point in pretendin’ otherwise.” The words were hazy and confusing, Harleen was fairly sure she hadn’t spoken but couldn’t be sure anymore. They were so loud she must have said them. Her fingers moved of their own volition, opening the file and scrolling quickly through four days of footage to the only night she’d promised herself she wouldn’t let herself indulge in.

Maybe watching footage that J clearly had wanted her to see and that she wanted to watch wasn’t such a bad thing. Sure, it was ethically and legally wrong, but she’d spent years arbitrarily picking and choosing what rules to follow. Besides, what set of morals or laws was more important than the two of them getting what they wanted?

With a toothy grin, Harleen walked to her bedroom to put down her iPad before walking to the bathroom. If she was going to do this, she was going to enjoy it damn it. She slipped out of the disgusting stained and sweaty blouse and pencil skirt she’d been wearing since Friday and stepped into a punishingly cold shower while giggling. She’d been working so hard for so many days. Didn’t she deserve a reward?

She stepped back into her bedroom, shivering violently but squeaky clean and wide awake. Before her voice of reason could start talking to her again, Harleen laid down on her bed and pressed play and watched the forbidden scene unfold before her eyes.

She was fairly sure he was perfection. In fact, she wasn’t even sure it was debatable. His hard muscles and disturbing tattoos made her want to kiss him from head to foot with particular attention to the fun bits in between.

The quality of the video wasn’t great but watching his face transform from bored irritation to transfixed arousal made her heart race. Even his threatening grin at the camera made her cross and uncross her legs anxiously. By the time he sat back down on his bed and pulled his cock out she could hear herself panting. Just the idea her monster had overwhelmed the walls of such a fiercely independent man made her squirm against her sheets.

He in no mood for teasing, griping himself tight while his face contorted in an effort to silence himself. His green hair was plastered to his forehead, making Harleen want to straddle him and push it back from his face while biting at his lips.

His hands were pulling at his balls, drawing her attention to his smooth skin. He was hairless everywhere, a bizarre quirk she desperately wanted to ask about, but in the moment was oddly aroused by. He wasn’t like other men, why should he look like them?

Without her permission, Harleen felt her hands wander down her body. She could feel her heart racing as she caressed her breasts. She let out a small gasp, startled by how sensitive her nipples were. Porn had never interested her, people in general didn’t arouse her, but hadn’t J said he wasn’t a person? He was the exception in every way, she smiled with a moan as she palmed her breasts more firmly.

With hooded eyes, Harleen watched a bead of arousal trickle down the back of his hand while he bit his lip. She couldn’t decide which she wanted more- to lick up that droplet or to take over biting his lips for him. Kissing had always felt unnecessarily intimate to her, but she couldn’t help but fantasize about his lips on hers, smearing the dark red lipstick he was so famous for across her face.

One hand snaked down her body, caressing the length of her folds. Had she ever been so wet before? She couldn’t remember if she had. Her fingers delved deeper, caressing the hood of her clit with her thumb while she sank a finger inside her pussy.

“Shit,” she muttered. Her hips rolled anxiously at the sensation while she fought to keep her eyes open and locked on the recording in front of her. J was bucking against his still slowly moving hand, his eyes locked on the image of her on his phone.

Harleen added another finger, moaning at the stretch, while her other hand plucked her nipples. God, she wished he was here with her, pressing his muscled body against hers and drilling his fingers into her wetness instead of her.

With a restless sigh, Harleen rolled over and opened her bedside table’s drawer to remove a curved pink dildo and a small blue bullet vibrator. It was a poor substitute for what she really wanted but it would have to do. Glancing back at the screen, she watched his hips start to buck against his hand. He was clearly close. Harleen rewound the footage by several minutes. She didn’t want him to come without her.

Her fingers ghosted lightly over her chest again, distractedly palming herself before returning to her sex. She rubbed the dildo along her slit, quickly coating it in her arousal. She teasingly rubbed it against her clit making her throw her head back and whine desperately. Slowly, she inserted the toy relishing the way her muscles clenched involuntarily around it. With her eyes closed it was so easy to imagine J’s face staring down at her as he fucked her through the mattress, but she didn’t want to miss a moment of him touching himself.

With a groan, she matched the paces of her thrusts to his hand. She wanted it hard and fast but, for now at least, she would synch their paces and imagine he was fucking her pussy not his hand.

Pressure inside her was building to a boiling point. The curved head of the toy pressed against her g-spot perfectly, making her release a broken sounding moan with each thrust. Despite her best efforts, she began thrusting faster and harder. It was impossible to keep at his speed anymore, her dripping sex demanded more.

“Damn it,” she grunted, her arousal seeping down her upper thighs and on to the mattress bellow her as the pulsing in her pussy began to throb. She forced herself to slow down and stop her building orgasm in its tracks. J was still minutes from coming and she wasn’t going to finish without him. Breathing deeply, she attempted to match her pace to his. After a few moments the delicious clenching between her legs began to fade. J’s face was twisting and his hips bucking on the screen of her iPad, but his hand still pumped him slowly.

“Please,” Harleen whined, unsure who she was asking and for what. The pace made her hips dance frantically to press the toy even harder against the front wall of her vagina. She forced herself to hold the dildo still, torturing herself by pressing it against her sweet spot without moving it. Forcing herself not to come while she traced slow light circles around her clit with the small bullet vibrator.

“J!” Harleen shouted between clenched teeth. She was so close. The tingling in her pussy was spreading down her legs and the thrumming in her core was only getting more intense. Blessedly, J began to pump himself hard and fast while bucking with uncharacteristic gracelessness against his hand.

Her hands flew between her legs. She pressed the toy deep and fast inside of herself, releasing a guttural shout with each plunge while her fingers moved the toy more firmly against her clit.

Suddenly J was staring at the camera, pumping himself with almost blinding speed and coming all over his abdomen. He said something, she didn’t know what, but she told herself it was her name. No matter what it was, the combination of the visual and the sensations ripping through her body left Harleen screaming his name while bright lights exploded behind her eyes. She was dimly aware of a rush of wetness and that her hips had lifted into the air to buck against nothingness, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

After a small eternity, she collapsed back to her bed. She slowly eased her toy from her pussy, groaning at the sensation, and turned off her vibrator. Collapsing on the bed, twitching happily from aftershocks, Harleen giggled quietly. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt this relaxed, this happy.

The ecstatic, uncontrollable feeling that had been building in her for weeks seemed to have crested leaving her in a near dreamlike state. She cast a glance at the iPad, looking at it like a lover, where J sat panting without breaking eye contact with the camera. With a dazed smile she blew her recording of J a kiss and, for first time in weeks, fell into a restful sleep.

Just as she was dozing off, she could have sworn she heard someone say “see, I toldjya you were bein’ a pussy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No little old ladies were harmed in the creation of this chapter.


	6. Avalanche

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “No one can make you give into it, little monster. I’ll help you. But if you want power, if you want freedom you have to take it yourself.” He whispered in her ear.  
> Harley pulled back to smile up at him. He’d seen versions of that face before. A little feral. A little cocky. A little worshipful. A little insane. But mostly he was trapped in the fire in her eyes that if he’d ever seen before it was only in the mirror. He hesitated, his lips centimeters from hers before he forced himself to pull away from her, trying to ignore the twinge of loss he felt when they separated.  
> “First things first. You have all weekend to yourself, Harley. Do your worst. Make me proud and make me laugh.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So… uh remember how I have those tags about violence? About two-thirds through this chapter is when they start to really come in.
> 
> TW for violence (duh) and vague references to child abuse

The board had been easier to convince that Dr. Reed. They rather liked the idea of being able to advertise to their donors that Arkham was innovating therapies for their most advanced cases. A few members eager to have their egos stroked discussed the possibility of publishing a case study or even creating a new pilot program if the initial test case was successful.

Mr. Wayne seemed to be the only one with serious reservations but seemed somewhat pacified after a sidebar conversation with Dr. Reed that Dr. Reed emerged from looking far to smug for his own good. Harleen wasn’t sure what they had discussed, but Dr. Reed had promised her that any and all additional protocol wouldn’t interfere with hers. He’d looked far too proud of himself while saying if for her to entirely believe him. But since he'd stopped bothering her about restarting ECT and had managed to get her proposal unanimous support, she'd tolerate the way he smugly sidestepped her questions.

One of the members of the board had recommended a change of venue for the new initiative. Though the biggest change between the two cement rooms seemed to be the addition of a window with broken blinds that were that were stuck permanently pulled down. The woman seemed to think that somehow adding a Freudian fainting couch to the ‘upgraded’ cement room would help the team ‘reach’ him. Or maybe it was just for the pictures for the press release to donors about their new methodology for advanced patients. Either way, three weeks later Harleen had official permission to begin her new treatment plan- with the bonus of an inexplicable couch that made both her and The Joker laugh hysterically.

“Did he think I was keeping secrets to protest the less than luxurious conditions?” Joker laughed when the guard escorted him into the new room for the first time.

“Naturally, what other reasons could you possibly have to be less than honest?” Harleen had smirked back before turning to the guard. “Thank you, Dean. Could you please take off his straight jacket before you go?”

“Excuse me?” The guard coughed sounding like he’d just been kicked in the stomach.

“Take off his straight jacket.” Harleen repeated. She knew it was dangerous and against the rules for, but in the last few weeks she found herself caring less and less about doing the ‘smart’ thing when the other option was much more fun.

“I can’t do that-” the guard began anxiously.

“Do you have the keys?”

“Yes, but-” He stammered.

“Then do it.”

“I’m sorry Dr. Quinzelle, but I can’t. It’s too dangerous.” He claimed, shifting awkwardly. Harleen’s narrowed eyes turned cold as she approached the guard with a fake smile.

“Oh, no. Dr- oh wait. You’re not a doctor, are you? Did you even go to college, Dean?”

“I don’t need to go to school to know that The Joker is dangerous. He attacked me last month!” He grumbled defensively. “It’s a danger to you while you’re working with him and all of the guards who will have to put the jacket back on him.”

“I don’t care about your logistical difficulties. Now take off his straight jacket, cuff him, and get out before I report you for interfering with a patient’s treatment.” She demanded with a sickeningly sweet smile. Dean glared at her and he busied himself with removing the straight jacket, handcuffing J, and connecting his wrist and ankle chains to the clip under the sofa. Harleen and J stared at each other, neither acknowledging or really noticing the guard’s angry huffs or how he slammed the door on his way out.

“My, my, my.” J purred, rolling his shoulders as theatrically as he could with his restraints. “I feel better already. Your new treatment protocol seems to be quite the successes.”

“Have a seat, J.” She giggled, waving him to the sofa where he promptly laid down. His feet propped up on the back of the couch and his chained wrists crisscrossed behind his neck, supporting his head. She tried not to admire his form, she’d never known anyone to look so graceful and so dangerous while so still. She utterly failed. But she did try (though admittedly not that hard).

In that pose it was hard not to think about the hours she’d watched him sleeping in his cell or reclining looking at his contraband phone. Which then always lead her back to thinking about the recording of him touching himself. Which then always lead to her thinking about how what she’d done to herself the many (many, many) times she’d watched that video in the last several weeks. Which then always lead to her squirming uncomfortably in her suddenly too wet panties.

“Not too bad, little monster. The board really went all out on furniture. Not nearly as luxurious as my old digs, but not too bad.” 

“If your old wardrobe was anything to go by, I believe that.” She smiled, wistfully imagining what The Joker’s home would look like.

“Has someone been looking at pictures of me?” He laughed; one naked eyebrow quirked looking at her with real interest. Harleen’s cheeks lit up while she tried to think of a reasonable excuse for some of the google image searches she’d done late at night after one too many drinks.

“Hardly. But it’s hard to avoid images of you in the news.” She quipped primly. Joker just hummed in response, communicating clear disbelief. “Well you got what you wanted, but if you want our daily sessions to continue you have to do your part.” She quickly continued, making no effort to hide her abrupt change of topic.

“I don’t have to do anything, and neither do you Barbie Monster,” he growled with a smile, “that’s the joy of being us.” Harleen blushed, trying to ignore his use of the word ‘us.’

“If you want to keep meeting daily then I need more to put in my reports than you’ve been giving me. You agreed to do that if I was able to make the schedule change.” She said, hating the pleading note in her voice. Yes, she could just lie in her reports. But her compulsive desire to be let inside the man’s head had only grown stronger with time as her sick obsession had grown and twisted. She wasn’t going to pass up on the opportunity to dig deeper into his mind.

“I suppose I did say that,” he sighed dramatically. “Fine. If I’m going to indulge your silly questions, at least make it entertaining.” He paused for a moment in thought, “I’ll tell you what Barbie Monster, I’ll make you a deal. You tell me something that you and your esteemed collogues think they have deduced about me, if you’re right I’ll answer a question. If you’re wrong, I get to ask a question.” He smiled hauntingly making Harleen look at him carefully.

“I’m not going to tattle.” He crooned.

“And why should I believe you?” She laughed. Whatever it was that underpinned their bizarre friendship (if it could be called that) it wasn’t trust.

“You shouldn’t.” He shrugged, “But I’m unlikely to break it the most entertaining toy I have right now. And besides, you want to play.”

“And you’ll tell me if I’m right?” Harleen asked skeptically, not believing a word he said.

“Scouts promise. Now that my hands are free, I can even raise my right hand.”

“Fine.”

“Ladies first, Barbie Monster.”

“You started playing pranks on Gotham to assert control by making everyone else feel as powerless as you once felt.” Harleen sighed, not even attempting to resist the urge to roll her eyes at the note that of all J’s doctors over the years had written some version of in his file.

“God that’s a boring.” He sighed, rolling his shoulders back. “My turn.” Harleen scowled at him, crossing her arms and tapping her fake fingernails on her clip board.

“What to ask? So many questions… let’s start here: when did you start pretending not to have a Brooklyn accent?”

“College. It was getting in my way.” Harleen responded, surprised by his question. He could ask anything, and he went with her speech patterns?

“Hmm, I can’t imagine little Dr. Barbie’s friends surprise if they were to hear her let her English be anything than perfect.”

“They wouldn’t believe you if you told them.” Harleen laughed before she could stop herself. “My turn, you want to prove that everyone is just deluding themselves into thinking they are good. You think a bad enough day could make anyone like you.”

“No one is as interesting as me. They don’t have the artistic vision I do.” He smiled grandiosely, “but they are all a bunch of liars to afraid to admit what they really are. I’ll give you half credit on that,” J said, clearly distracted. “You get a yes or no question.”

“That wasn’t part of the rules!” She protested loudly.

“Creatures like us aren’t really known for following rules, Harley, you of all people should know that.” He said with a cocky grin that made her smirk.

“Do you have any complete remaining memories of who you were before you were The Joker?” She sighed. She wasn’t convinced that understanding some series of traumas from before he was The Joker would help her understand him, but she was still curious.

“Yes.” He grunted.

“What kinds of things are you still able to remember?” She asked, gripping her pen tighter with excitement.

“Tsk, tsk those aren’t the rules.” He smirked with narrowed eyes. “Why did you quit gymnastics junior year of college?” He asked with a raised brow. Harleen narrowed her eyes and gritted her jaw.

“The donor who was sponsoring me stopped feeling generous,” she shrugged with a barely concealed glare. 

“There’s more to that story, Harley.” He laughed, sitting up in the couch and leaning towards her.

“Fine.” She laughed, “I got too cocky for my own good, I was twenty so it’s not exactly surprising. I thought I was better at… talking people into doing me favors than I was. I got sloppy and the person who had been helping me pay for school stopped feeling so generous. Don’t get me wrong, I was good- he paid to do my teeth and got me my first car- but I pushed too far too quickly. I had to increase my work-study hours and ended up having to choose between making rent and staying on the team.”

“Mm, to be young and stupid,” J laughed darkly with real amusement, “that takes me back to my first pranks.” Harleen smiled, thinking back on his stories. While the man might be almost impossible to get to talk about his feelings or anything that happened before he was The Joker, he was happy to talk for hours about his various crimes. And she loved to listen to him.

“My turn. You think that chaos is the only real power.”

“Hmm, you’re not quite right…” He hummed in thought. “But you’re close enough to get a to ask a question anyway.”

“If you had the choice, right now, would you rather play with Batman or get back at Catwoman?”

“Oh, that’s a fun question.” J smiled hauntingly, his golden teeth glinting in the low light. “Once I get out of here Batsy will come looking for me.”

Harleen wasn’t startled to hear him say he’d be breaking out of Arkham, no one really thought that Arkham would hold The Joker forever. Rather than the panic or dread that any reasonable person would have felt in thinking about The Joker being released back onto the streets, she felt something akin to excitement. Whatever dread she felt was far more focused on what it would mean for her to stop having access to him whenever she wanted. She had no interest in analyzing that particular feeling further. 

“Catwoman, however, is much harder to find.” J continued, “she’s slippery and is working particularly hard to avoid me and my associates right now. While Batsy is much more entertaining, I’d love to get a few hours with her to remind her that our game isn’t finished.” As he spoke, J’s eyes grew darker and his smile more sinister. By the time he finished speaking his voice was almost a whisper.

He was hypnotic in his threatening power. Beautiful. Terrifying. Perfect. Harleen could barely breath, she was suffocating with a kind of all-consuming _want._ All she wanted was to get up from her chair and sit in his lap while threats continued to rumble from his lips. She wanted to taste them while they spilled of his tongue and into her mouth. She wanted to feel the danger, the violence that buzzed just under his skin and let it consume her.

She didn’t realize she was leaning towards him until she felt the puffs of breath from his next words against her lips.

“Your turn,” he crooned dangerously, with a dark smile. “Why was your last guess wrong?”

She suddenly leaned back, tucking her straightened hair behind her ear and attempting to slow her breathing. He was looking back at her just as intently, frozen leaning towards her, his bright eyes glinting with something she hadn’t seen before. Harleen paused, looking like she was thinking very carefully before she finally spoke again.

“Ya don’t really think chaos is the only power otherwise you wouldn’t be able to cause it,” she paused for a moment. “Kinda like an avalanche, you just trigger it and watch the wreckage it causes.” She clicked her pen a few times and absentmindedly bit at her lip, not noticing the look on her patients face. “You wanna prove you got the only real power.” She said slowly and quietly, looking at him carefully.

“Interesting.” He said with a thoughtful voice that she couldn’t tell if it was mocking or not.

“Am I right?”

He nodded slowly with an unreadable expression. When he didn’t respond verbally, a question burst from her lips that she’d been fighting to contain for weeks or months or maybe her whole life, she couldn’t be sure anymore.

“What’s it like?” She asked, unable to stop herself from asking. Joker’s absent eyebrows rose, not needing to ask what she meant.

“It’s freedom.” He whispered like he was communicating sacred wisdom. “You control the set up, the rules. You pour the gasoline trails but you don’t know just where or when it will ignite. You just know you’ll get to watch the world burn.”

Harleen stared at him wide eyed and given up on any attempt to regulate her breathing. It was impossible to say if it was by him or the power he embodied- but she was hypnotized. She’d fantasized about that kind of freedom, that kind of dominance for her whole life. Each and every day the consequences of selfishly choosing true power, utter chaos, were harder and harder to remember. And with time, the temptation only grew.

“Is it funny?” She asked, dimly aware that her voice had taken on an almost childlike tone.

“Oh, Harley,” he smiled broadly, “it’s the funniest joke in the world.”

* * *

J was almost taken aback by the glee in her eyes. There was something childish and dangerous and almost sickly sweet about it. His voices still screamed at him to remain detached and only give her enough so that she would help break him out- but at the moment he didn’t give a fuck about his escape.

In truth, he wasn’t even sure who was pushing who anymore. Rather than wait for him to push her towards the edge, Harley was now tugging him behind while she played chicken with madness. However eager he was to watch her admit to her less than wholesome interests, she was even more eager to explore the darker ones that just months ago he wasn’t sure she’d even be able to confess.

“Don’t you want to be in on the joke, Harley?” he purred, before he could talk himself out of asking her. He wasn’t sure how far she really was willing to go but he could barely breathe in anticipation. He just wanted to see that fire smoldering inside of her catch and burn her until the good doctor was ashes at his feet and her perfect little monster knelt in front of him.

Harleen opened and closed her mouth a few times before nodding mutely. J stood from the sofa and pulled her to standing so her face was inches from his.

“Ask me for it.” J smiled, his golden grin stretching painfully wide. He rested one hand on her jaw, tilting her head up at him so she was forced to look him in the eye.

“I-” she began, before her voice wavered and went silent.

“Look at me.” He growled, tracing one finger over the lip she was biting on so hard she threatened to draw blood. “Pretty, pretty…” He began trailing off for her to complete the sentence.

“Please.” She whispered, barely audible over his own pounding heart.

“You are so good.” J whispered, unable to stop the words from escaping his lips. He wasn’t sure what he meant- good was rarely a word he was associated with. But Harley’s corruption in that moment was pure perfection. 

He leaned closer to her so that his lips were level with her ear. Normally the mere sensation of being touched by someone was enough to enrage him but in that moment he couldn’t have cared less. He relished in the press of her breasts against his torso, the softness of her hair against his face, the brush of her gasping breath against his cheek. His hand rested at the base of her throat, not squeezing or choking but both of them intimately aware that he could.

“No one can make you give into it, little monster. I’ll help you. But if you want power, if you want freedom you have to take it yourself.” He whispered in her ear.

Harley pulled back to smile up at him. He’d seen versions of that face before. A little feral. A little cocky. A little worshipful. A little insane. But mostly he was trapped in the fire in her eyes that if he’d ever seen before it was only in the mirror. He hesitated, his lips centimeters from hers before he forced himself to pull away from her, trying to ignore the twinge of loss he felt when they separated.

“First things first. You have all weekend to yourself, Harley. Do your worst. Make me proud and make me laugh.”

* * *

Harleen nodded slowly, unsure what she was expected to do. She was still reeling from his touch, she could still feel his breath on her lips and his hand on her face even though he’d retreated to the couch where he sat staring at her in rapt attention. If she’d been smart, she would have run out the door and kept going until she was so far away that no one knew who she was. But when tempted with freedom like he was offering, escape from the mummers show she’d been putting on for years, power over those around her- no one could expect her to say no. She couldn’t walk away from the dangerous temptation in front of her.

She took a deep uneven breath that seemed almost shockingly loud in the silence of the interview room. Undoubtedly, there was anxiety churning inside of her. Impressing The Joker was a near impossible task that she wasn’t sure anyone was capable of. But if, as seemed increasingly likely, she was going to hell she might as well have fun along the way.

J looked up at her with a curious but rapt attention. His gaze was haunting but somewhere in his weeks he was at Arkham it stopped making her blood run cold and instead made her heart skip a beat. Almost without her notice Harleen stepped closer to the chained man until her hand came to rest on his jaw and forced him to make eye contact with her. His eyes tightened at the contact, clearly retraining himself from flinching. She could feel his pulse racing under her fingertips, from anxiety, excitement, or something else altogether she couldn’t tell. What he wanted from her or planned to do with her was a mystery but in that moment it didn’t matter. She was in control.

He was driven by anger, revenge, lust for power, and a near slavish devotion to chaos. She could and would give him that. Even as the ecstatic feeling of control jolted through her veins, she mulled over what she would do once she left the little interview room. His piercing eyes stared up at her, reveling in her blatant lack of control.

No one had ever really seen the ugly parts of herself the way he had. And no one had ever looked at them so approvingly. With him she wasn’t a rotten nobody desperately trying to blend in, she was a cruel and powerful masterpiece whose talents for manipulation were to be celebrated. Her darkest impulses were beautiful and heady, not shameful and secret. He saw all of her, every fucked-up inch, and he wanted her all the more for it.

And she loved him for it.

A laugh bubbled from her lips before she could stop it. God knows she wanted more from him than he was able to give, and God knows he’d kill her for trying. But no matter how much he would deny it, they both knew she had power over him just as much as he had power over her.

“I’ll see ya Monday, Mistah J.” She whispered, running her fingers through his unruly green locks. He growled in response, leaning into her hand. His eyes were dark and threatening in a way that made her pussy thrum to life. She could see a distinct tent in his Arkham issued sweatpants and had to resist the urge to drop to her knees and pay homage to him like the god he was.

“I can’t wait,” he eventually growled before his face split into a wide, dangerous grin. Before she could stop herself, Harley began to giggle- laughing at the beautiful absurdity of the moment. J began to laugh along with her, their twisted laughter twining together and bouncing off the thick concrete walls.

* * *

J reclined in his cell not even bothering to hide his delighted grin. The little monster was off her leash. He'd dreamt about what that would be like more than he'd ever admit.

In the last weeks his usual half remembered dreams he treated like memories had shifted. His blurry nightmare about tanks, the man with the knife, the woman with a Glasgow grin, the dead pregnant woman in the wrecked car had all become less and less frequent. While he appreciated being able to sleep for more than a handful of hours, he found himself closing his eyes and going over the details from his old nightmares just to make sure they didn't fade.

He still had some of his better dreams about stage lights, the small apartment, and the rich martial arts enthusiast but even those had changed. Harley kept appearing in them. Sitting in the audience and beckoning him out to the streets to play a hideous prank. Reclining on the tattered couch in the apartment quipping back and forth with him in her thick Brooklyn accent. Sparing with him in on the expensive sparring mats the rich man kept in his private gym. Those evolving dreams horrified him as much as the fascinated him.

But he reveled in his dreams about a fully feral Harley completely off her leash. He usually woke from those laughing or fucking his fist. And now, he chuckled with a dangerous grin, it wouldn't be a dream anymore. He wasn’t sure what she’d do or how she’d do it, but just imaging her in all her ferocious freedom made his cock twitch hard in his pants. Over the years, he’d tried his share of drugs and he’d never found one as powerful or addictive as her monster.

* * *

Harleen regarded herself in the mirror with a tense grin. She couldn’t tell if she was more scared or excited for what she was about to do. It was an obviously bad idea. If she was caught the consequences would be devastating. Her life, career, and freedom would all be gone.

“What the hell are you doing, Harley?” She muttered while looking at a range of implements she’d laid out on the bed next to her gym bag. A knife she normally kept in her purse, a heavy hammer she’d stolen from a construction site for no particular reason, duct tape, and a pair of pliers. She had already stuffed a bottle of bleach and elbow length gloves in the bottom of the bag alongside a syringe she’d stolen from work. Dean had left the emergency sedative cabinet in the guard’s office unlocked (again). It had been simple to grab a syringe and prime it with enough sedatives to stop a seven-foot-tall man having a full-blown psychotic break.

“Nothin’ we don’t all wanna do.” She giggled, not entirely sure if she’d just thought the words or actually said them aloud. How many years had she fantasized about letting her monster free? How many nights as a kid had she spent hiding in her closet from the screams down the hall next to her collection of stolen Spicegirls CD’s imagining what it would be like to be the one making someone scream? How many times had she dreamed about shutting up yet another idiot who underestimated her by drawing bloody doodles on them? How many mornings had she woken up in a rich man’s bed and arranged her face into something pretty by fantasizing about what it would be like to tear him apart?

“You could lose everything.” She growled at her reflection, glaring at the ‘Hailey’ costume she’d donned for hopefully the last time. She’d squeezed herself into skintight blue jeans and a low-cut white top that could have been mistaken for girl-next-door if it hadn’t shown so much cleavage.

“Isn’t anything that we wanna keep.” She sighed dismissively at her reflection while rubbing a damp corner of a hand towel on her eyes to make her mascara run down her cheeks. Perfect.

What she was about to do was insane. Bringing her daydreams to life was one of the most thrilling things she could imagine. But the risk was very, very real. Yet somehow the most terrifying parts were it not living up to her fantasy or it disappointing J.

Harleen pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head as she locked her front door behind her. She supposed she could still turn around, put a stop to this madness and get a grip on herself. She hadn’t gone too far yet.

The streets were cold and dark. It was almost midnight by the time she reached the subway station. The only people still out were a few drunken early twenty-somethings bar hopping and homeless people looking a place to sleep. In the scant crowds of the stop, her ever present shadow, Tuck, was even more obvious than usual. She grinned at him, letting him know he’d lost yet another round of “Where’s Waldo.” He looked slightly horrified, then embarrassed, then eventually attempted to smile back but ended up looking more like he’d just been hit in the balls than anything else.

Harleen laughed to herself. She wondered absently if Tuck would follow her or would scamper away in embarrassment. She hoped he would run off so J wouldn’t get a sneak peak of her extracurriculars.

She supposed she could still turn around, she mused absently. She could go back to Dr. Quinzelle and hide in her apartment like the good girl she’d tried so hard to be. But why would she do that when she had much more a much more fun option that the only person whose opinion that she valued was urging her to explore?

By the time the train came to a stop in Otisburg she gleefully stepped off, stopping only to wave good-bye at Tuck’s as the doors closed on his befuddled face and the train pulled away. There was no point in bothering to follow the rules when saying fuck it all and not following any of them felt so, so good. Especially when not following the rules allowed her to do something she’d wanted for so long _and_ give the person she wanted a piece of information that he craved so desperately.

The walk to the gym normally took about fifteen minutes but it flew by in an amusing blur. Pausing at the front door, she took a deep breath and began to giggle. There really was already no going back. She knew what she wanted, and no one was going to stop her- not even herself.

Picking the lock didn’t take long, lord knows she’d had enough practice in her misspent youth. Before she knew it, she was tip-toeing her way to Karl’s office. She knocked lightly on the door frame with a slight smile. The way he jumped and reached for the gun resting on his desk made it hard for her not to start laughing.

“Hailey, is that you? You scared the hell out of me!” He shouted, lurching to his feet.

“Sorry!” She pouted, “I knocked, but you must not have heard me.”

“How the fuck did you get in here? We closed up an hour ago.” He demanded uneasily.

“The door was open.” She lied, walking over next to where Karl stood and placing a pacifying hand on his chest with an apologetic smile. After a moment, his face relaxed and he placed his hand on top of hers and intertwined their fingers. Harleen choked back a snort. Jesus he was easy to play.

“What are you doing here, beautiful? I haven’t seen you for weeks.”

“I’m sorry.” She said quietly, shifting anxiously.

“I’ve been worried about you what with how you ran off when that man paid your bills.” He responded in an uncharacteristically kind tone.

“I know, I… I got scared” she whispered. “That’s kinda why I’m here.” She whined, making her eyes go as wide as possible.

“About the guy who paid off your bills?” He asked confusedly, sitting back down with a baffled expression. Harleen resisted the urge to roll her eyes. How stupid was he? Instead, she nodded slowly while willing her unblinking eyes to start watering already.

“Come here, Hailey.” He beckoned her closer and motioned for her to sit on his lap. Harleen swallowed back her disgust and threw herself at him, wrapping her arms around his neck and clinging to him like he was her lifeline. Her bag of toys swung around the back of his chair and bounced off of her thigh before coming to rest on her lap. “Who is he?”

“I…” Harleen began, unsure which sob story to use. “I don’t really know.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I noticed him hanging around diner during my shifts a few months ago. At first, I didn’t mind, he tips well… But then he started following me. He joined the gym, I’ve caught in my apartments lobby a few times, and I even saw him on the subway while I was coming here!” She sobbed with false tears while trying to hide her amusement about how little of what she said was a lie. “I don’t know what he wants, but I know he’s armed and I’m so scared he’s going to hurt me.”

“Oh, I can guess what he wants.” Karl growled angrily, tightening his grip on her. “If you were mine, Hailey, I wouldn’t let anyone touch you. Me and my boys would make sure of it.” He promised, gesturing to the gun on his desk.

Harleen tried and failed to keep herself from cringing at his words. No one conditioned protection or some pretty present based on owning her. No one controlled her. No one could protect her. Especially not a cocky biker who couldn’t even protect himself.

“What about you? Would you be allowed to touch me?” Harleen forced herself to giggle, wanting to tear Karl apart for the predictable way his eyes darkened. His hands shifted from rubbing her back to grabbing her ass. She never used to mind how other people touched her while she played with them, she didn’t like it, but it didn’t make her sick. But now that she’d felt the touch of someone who she actually wanted, the hard lump of his crotch pressing against her hip made her swallow back vomit.

“You wouldn’t be able to stop me.” He laughed, low and long while pulling her against him. She hated his laugh. It was all wrong. Nothing like her J’s.

“You so sure about that?” She giggled back, slowly removing the syringe from her bag.

“You’d be welcome to try; I like my girls to at least put up a bit of a fight.” He growled back, biting her shoulder. Harleen couldn’t stop the furious expression her face twisted into, and thankfully she didn’t have to as she jammed the syringe into his neck.

“What the fu-” Karl began, clutching his neck, “whadidya…” he slurred before slumping to the side unconscious.

Harleen stood and set a timer for five minutes. Quickly, she removed her knit winter gloves and pulled on her rubber ones and slid a hair net on over her beanie. She wasn’t sure how much duct tape it took to restrain a person, but she figured if she wrapped the entire role up and down the length of his body and the chair it would be good enough. Before long the man was immobilized, his socks and shoes thrown somewhere over her shoulder, and his mouth taped shut.

Harleen picked up her knife with a laugh and started tracing it over Karl, unsure if it was real or not. How many times had she fantasized about this? Hundreds? Thousands? Sometimes she imagined specific people, people who hurt her, people who annoyed her, people who underestimated her. Usually it wasn’t anyone in particular. As long as they were restrained, and she was the one holding the weapon it didn’t really matter who it was.

Karl came to slowly, blinking several times in confusion before his eyes came into focus. It took several moments for him to realize he’d been restrained and a few moments more for him to see the knife in Harleen’s hand. His normally cocky expression quickly morphed into one of rage. He was yelling something behind the gag, probably threats, but it was impossible to understand him. But seeing him try to claim control of the situation when he was so clearly powerless was hilarious.

“Morning, Karl.” Harleen giggled. “I know ya probably a lil’ confused right now, that’s ok. I’d be pretty upset if I were you. I need to ask ya a few itty-bitty questions ‘bout Catwoman then this will be all ovah. I pinky promise.” Harleen laughed, ripping the gag (and a fair bit of facial hair) from his lips to see what he would say.

“What the fuck are you doing, you crazy bitch? Untie me right the fuck now and I won’t have you killed.” He spat. Harleen laughed, unsurprised by his response, and picked up the hammer from her bag. Karl was a tough and proud man he wasn’t about to give up without a fight. But Harleen was a stubborn creature and wouldn’t give up on something she’d fantasized about for so long, especially when it was in aid of her J. With a grin, she picked up the hammer and brought it down as hard as she could on his knee.

His curses and threats turned to screams. She wasn’t sure she’d ever heard anything more satisfying.

“I didn’t ask you to threaten me, Karl.” She growled with a smile, wrapping her hands around his neck until he turned a hilarious shade of purple. “I asked you to tell me about Catwoman.”

“Who are you? Who sent you?”

“My name is Harley and I sent myself.” She giggled, tapping the hammer on his other knee in warning. “Now fair’s fair, it’s your turn to answer my question.”

“Why would I tell you?” He cursed, “you’re nothing compared to the kind of people that would be sent after me for snitching.”

“Wrong answer.” Harley said coolly, all amusement leaving her face. In rapid succession she brought the hammer down on his other knee and kneeling down to slam it on to his left ankle. “Call me nothing again and I’ll go for your balls next. Tell me where she is.”

“I can’t!” He cried. Harley couldn’t stop laughing. Watching this tough man who could break her in half if he wanted to crumble was the most amusing thing she’d ever seen.

“Wrong again.” She giggled, picking up the pliers and moving to his bare feet. The next fifteen minutes were bloody, and gory, and horrifying. She knew what his screams should have made her feel. But instead she felt something like ecstatic. She wasn’t sure what to label the feeling of giving into her worst impulses but instantly craved more. God, why had she been fighting to be good, or at least seem good, for so long?

“Please.” Karl begged as she stood to begin work on his fingers, “please.”

“Are ya gonna behave?”

“Anything you want,” he gasped unevenly, “please just stop.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know where she lives,” he whimpered, his words coming out in a rapid tumble “but her goods are stashed in the east end docks near Miller Harbor. The loft of warehouse six on pier thirteen. Third door on the left. She does all of her business out of there! She doesn’t do front men or representatives it’s a one woman show. She’s there all the time! Please stop!”

“Good boy,” Harley murmured, stroking his ashen, clammy face. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“Please, I told you everything you need to know. Let me go. Please.”

“I don’t know…” She giggled, grinning down at the bloody, trembling man in front of her.

“I can give you her number! I have her number! It’s in my desk. Please.” He begged. Harley walked over to his desk and carefully leafed through that stacks of paper until she found the right one. She noticed his car keys and pocketed them. Those would come in handy for cleaning up her mess.

“I guess I could let you go,” Harley hummed to herself, turning back to the restrained man. “But I don’t really want to.”

She stared down at the terrified man and picked back up her hammer, reveling in the expression on his face. She knew it well; she’d seen it often enough in the mirror. It was pure terror. Awareness of what was coming. Desperation. She’d always hated it when she saw it on herself but found she’d never seen anything more beautiful when someone else wore it.

Harley raised the hammer over her head and, with a laugh, brought it down on his skull.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *hides behind my laptop* Well… what do you all think?


	7. Kitty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her eyes traced over his every feature as if she could brand them into her mind. She stared at him intently trying to memorize his hair’s exact shade of green, the way light reflected off his grill, the J tattooed to his cheek. His eyes burned back into hers. She wasn’t sure if he was doing the same, but she liked to think he was. Ultimately whatever he was thinking, whatever he was doing, didn’t really matter as the world turned to a dull blur around them. It was just the two of them and a consuming, violent hunger for each other. She wasn’t sure if she lost or found herself looking in his eyes, but it made Dr. Quinzelle and Harleen fall away completely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy, oh boy we’re getting close to the breakout, guys. This is my first take at rewriting a scene from the flashbacks in SS, and to put it mildly this chapter completely kicked my ass. But long story short, 10,000 drafts later, mission accomplished and it's actually one of my favorite chapters of this story. 
> 
> Oh, by the way (in an unsurprising plot twist) we’re back with the lemons. Proceed with caution those who read at work… unless you’re into that kind of thing. In which case, carry on.

J had spent the better part of the weekend fantasizing about what Harley was going to do to impress him.

It had been so distracting that he hardly paid attention to the half dozen email’s Frost had sent updating him on his immanent breakout. Yes, he read them. Yes, he responded. Yes, he made a mental note to expedite his plans to get Harley to bring him some toys. But he wasn’t half as excited about his breakout as he was about the nightmares Harley could potentially be making.

He’d been so engrossed in his fantasize that he’d barely reacted to the guards who’d mockingly announced that the big boss had come down and forbidden him from wearing handcuffs in sessions anymore. Sure, he’d absentmindedly added whoever the hell ‘Dr. Reed’ was to his hit-list but hadn’t actually given it much thought. He wasn’t interesting enough to come up with an amusing way to kill when he was so busy with fantasies of an unleashed Harley in all her feral glory.

By the time Monday rolled around, he could hardly contain himself. He didn’t even fight the guards who shoved into his straitjacket. The indignity of the situation and his disgust at their touch paled in comparison to what was waiting for him. In the moment, all J wanted was to listen his toy turned monster tell her story. By the time he’d been chained to his chair he was beyond eager and was fairly certain that the blaring alarm announcing her entry was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.

“You can go, Dean.” Harley said coolly from the door, not bothering to great the guard standing sentry in the corner.

“Morning Mr. J, how are you?” She asked blandly from somewhere behind him near the door making J growl to himself impatiently. He wouldn’t degrade himself to the point of admitting his obsesive curiosity and twisting in the chair to look at her over his shoulder.

The second the door closed with a less than affable grunt from the guard, she entered into his field of vision and her intentionally blank smile transformed. Her eyes went from flat and dull to glimmering with terrifying excitement and her lips quirked into a perfectly deranged sweet smile. J forced himself to remain impassive, waiting until she sat down to ask the question that he’d been dying to know the answer to for days.

“Miss me?” She asked teasingly.

"Dr. Quinzelle, I live for these moments with you. What do you got?” J asked in an overly smooth voice, attempting a mask just how hungry he was to know what she’d done.

“I brought you a Kitty.” She said, pulling a plush toy out of her bag and holding out towards him. J was taken aback, swallowing back a wave of disappointment. He looked at her carefully, trying to figure out just what was supposed to be so interesting stuffed animal.

“So thoughtful.” He purred with narrowed eyes, attempting to piece together what she was trying to tell him. Pulling a severed head out of her purse would have been funnier but if she wanted to speak in riddles, he’d play her game.

“I’d wanted you to open your present yourself, but since you’re all tied up again…” she sighed sadly, pulling a small pen knife from the breast pocket of her lab coat and cutting a long incision down a sloppily sewn together seam. J raised an absent eyebrow, curious as to how she’d managed to get the knife through security and wondering just what else she’d be able to smuggle in.

“Ta-da!” She giggled, pulling out a small piece of paper from inside the stuffing and sliding it towards him. ‘East End Docks, Pier 13, Warehouse 6, Third door on left. 212-548-8228’ was scrawled in her perfect cursive with hearts over the ‘i’s instead of dots. J looked curiously at the unfamiliar address and number wondering what was so special about it. Had she broken in and stolen something shiny? Or, better, had she burned it down? But if it was about the address, what the hell did she give him the number for?

“I found her, Mistah J.” She blurted out, interrupting his train of thought, clearly impatient with his inability to connect the dots.

“Who?” He asked, making only a minimal effort to hide his confusion.

“Catwoman.”

“You found Catwoman?” He demanded, a combination of shocked and impressed and aroused that made it hard to wrap his mind around her words.

“Mm-hm.”

“How?” he choked out, completely stunned.

“Karl had mentioned that he was fencing goods for her a little while ago and I followed up on that over the weekend.” She smiled coyly. J felt his blood freeze and his eyes harden.

“And how did you happen to get him to part with this information?” He growled dangerously. He wasn’t sure why he was asking; he knew damn well how she got men to do what she wanted. He was less certain why it made him want to find and tear the man into little pieces then scream at the creature in front of him. Though, curiously, not even his darkest voice chose to suggest killing her.

J almost missed how her coy smile turned feral.

“I’ve always wanted to tear someone apart. Now I have.” She giggled, her eyes going out of focus and far away. J stopped breathing.

“What did the little monster do over the weekend?” He demanded in an as close to a pleading tone as he’d ever heard escape his lips.

“I asked nicely but he didn’t want to share with the class, so I made him tell me,” she smiled dreamily. “Then I killed him, Mistah J.” J felt like the world stopped spinning for a moment and his organs had been violently rearranged in an oddly pleasant way.

“How?” He demanded breathlessly once he was able to find his voice. Not only had she gone and let her monster of its leash- she’d killed someone to find someone he desperately wanted to play with that even his most skilled investigators hadn’t been able to locate. 

“Well, I sedated him and taped him up while he was out. When he still wouldn’t tell me ‘bout Catwoman, I broke his knee with a hammer. Then he called me a nobody, so I got kinda distracted and broke his other knee. And an ankle. I also mighta cut off his toes. After he told me what I wanted to know, I just sorta kept hitting him till he stopped breathing.” She murmured with a hazy smile.

“What did you do with the body?” J asked, forcing himself to focus on checking to see if one of his men needed to go clean up her mess before losing himself in her monster.

“After I cleaned up, I drove his car over by the North Finger bridge. I put him in the driver’s seat, threw it in neutral, gave it a push, and watched him go for a swim.” She giggled.

“Baby’s first kill,” J groaned under his breath.

He’d have his men burn down the gym in the off chance the cops got too curious. But good God. Barbie Monster had gone and tortured information out of someone and killed them so beautifully. He had half planned on killing Karl once he got out of Arkham for reasons he absolutely did not want to analyze but oddly found the idea of her killing Karl much more enjoyable. Normally he’d be angry that someone took his toy, but he would make an exception for Harley. “How did it feel?”

“I know torturing him to death was wrong… especially since I did it just for fun and to get you a present.” She giggled quietly, “but I don’t feel even close to sorry.”

“Was it as good as you imagined it would be?” J pressed her; he didn’t care about morality. While it was reassuring that she wasn’t busy feeling guilty or some similar boring human emotion, it wasn’t what he wanted to know.

“It was better.” She smiled toothily. J smirked, the Dr. Quinzelle he’d met just a few months earlier would have denied she’d ever fantasized about murder. He never could have imagined in his wildest dreams that she’d eventually be reminiscing about her first kill with him.

“Did you like it?”

“No.” She said firmly, making J lean back in surprise.

“No?”

“I loved it.” She giggled, a mad grin spreading across her face.

“My god, little monster.” J groaned, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to control himself. From what he wasn’t sure what. Fucking her. Dragging her out of Arkham. Taking her to ACE and making her like him. Some combination of all of the above.

“ _Listen to yourself, take her with us? Make her like us? No one is like us. She’s ruining you.”_ Growled his darkest voice, making J flinch in surprise. They hadn’t been talkative over the weekend and he’d appreciated the silence. The words made him shift uncomfortably in his seat. He rarely headed what any of his voices said, but it was hard to deny that Harley encouraged unfamiliar impulses in him.

He shook his head in a marginally successful attempt to dispel the unsettling voice’s commentary. Harley was a distracting and fascinating as she was dangerous. While good god it was tempting to fantasize about getting tangled up with her monster, he knew better than that. Her worshipful gaze and bizarre concern for his well-being might make him feel something unfamiliar and oddly pleasant but he wasn’t about to ignore the uncomfortable way it twisted his gut.

Besides, there was no reason to make a real choice about what to do with Harley just yet. His judgment couldn’t be trusted when he was too close to her.

Kill her, keep her, discard her- he could decide once he was far, far away from her confounding presence. He laughed bitterly to himself, he was fairly sure he wasn’t going to kill her any time soon. She was far too… well, he didn’t have a good word for what she was. But she was far too much of it for him to want her dead.

J shook his head again and forced himself to focus. Debating what to do with her was all theoretical until he got out of Arkham. He had far more important things to worry about now.

A week ago, he hadn’t been certain how far she’d be willing to go for him. While murdering Karl was at least as much for her as it was for him, she’d made her bloody ambitions abundantly clear. While her interest in him was baffling, he was fairly sure she’d do whatever he asked _if_ she thought it would actually help him. She was crazier than he was, he laughed to himself. Anyone who wanted The Joker the way she did had to be.

At least her insanity was equal parts fascinating and entertaining. And useful.

“There is something you could for me.” He purred thoughtfully, making Harley jolt out of her murderous daydreams.

“Anything, I mean, yeah.” She said, stumbling over her words. J resisted the urge to smirk. He didn’t understand why she would or when he started to believe it, but he knew when she said ‘anything’ she meant it.

“I need a machine gun.”

* * *

“A machine gun?” She asked, startled from her memories. J just grinned at her.

Harley was taken aback. She’d always known he’d inevitably breakout in a shockingly bloody and hilariously theatrical way. But she’d never dreamed that he would involve her in it.

“How?” She stammered, unable to hide how blindsided she felt.

“You’re a clever little monster, I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”

“I…” she began, not even bothering to hide her surprise. Where on earth would she get a machine gun? She wasn’t even close to being arms dealer- hell, she murdered Karl with a hammer. The few guns she’d touched had all belonged to big men trying to impress her. The only place she’d even seen a machine gun was in movies or on TV.

“My men are just waiting for my signal. Get me the gun and they’ll take care of the rest.” He said smoothly, as if he was just asking her to pick up some milk at the grocery store on her way home rather than aid his breakout for a maximum-security facility.

“Oh.” Harley said, refusing to meet his eyes. He was leaving and he was leaving soon. What would happen to them after he broke out? Once he left Arkham there wouldn’t be a ‘them’ to speak of. The idea of living only to go back to her old life (assuming she survived the breakout) without him made her want to vomit.

The adrenaline high she’d been coasting on since murdering Karl began to crash, leaving her hands shaking and her face pale. Now that she knew what it was like for someone to crave the twisted parts of herself, not her lies or her stories, she wasn’t sure how to content herself with anything less.

“Look at me, Harley.” He purred softly but dangerously, “don’t you want to help me get out of here?”

“Help you?” Harley laughed, a look of true disbelief running across her face. The idea of The Joker needing help and _her_ of all people helping him with no benefit to herself was hilarious. If it had been anyone else, she would have laughed them out of the room.

But it wasn’t anyone else it was Him. And he’d shown her a glimpse of what total chaos, total freedom could be like.

“I’d do anything to help you.” She said, her eyes completely empty.

“Oh, I already know that my murderous little monster.” J growled in approval. “You’re just perfect.” Harley resisted the urge to flinch. How the hell he could make plans that likely involved leaving her behind in one breath and then call her perfect in the next?

Her eyes traced over his every feature as if she could brand them into her mind. She stared at him intently trying to memorize his hair’s exact shade of green, the way light reflected off his grill, the J tattooed to his cheek. His eyes burned back into hers. She wasn’t sure if he was doing the same, but she liked to think he was.

Ultimately whatever he was thinking, whatever he was doing, didn’t really matter as the world turned to a dull blur around them. It was just the two of them and a consuming, violent hunger for each other. She wasn’t sure if she lost or found herself looking in his eyes, but it made Dr. Quinzelle and Harleen fall away completely.

His tongue darted out to wet his pale lips making her breath catch in her throat. His eyes were locked on hers and that manic tingling she’d come to grow so fond of filled her body.

He wasn’t hers, he couldn’t be owned, but for a moment she could pretend. If he was going to leave her and her monster behind, she was going to steal a memory where he was all hers. It would have to be enough- it was all she was going to get. At least she’d have that, even if was based on a lie. But she’d cocooned herself in lies for years, they had become far more comfortable than truths. Why change her tune now?

Before she truly realized what she was doing, Harley was out of her seat and stepping towards the restrained man that, at some catastrophic moment, she had come to love more than life itself.

“What are you doing, little monster,” J growled with thinly veiled shock while her selfish fingers unbuttoned her blouse, slowly bearing the dark purple lace of her bra.

“Shh,” Harley whispered before sinking with practiced grace to straddle his lap.

* * *

“I thought we’d said goodbye to Harleen.” He warned dangerously, an expression somewhere between disgust and curiosity on his face, hoping his venom would scare the monster away.

“Harleen wouldn’t have done this.” She laughed bitterly, her hands sliding up his bound shoulders.

“That is the biggest lie I’ve heard you tell, and that’s saying something, little girl.” He growled with as much malice as he could muster without blood circulating to his brain.

“Harleen wouldn’t have done it without somthin’ in it for her and I don’t want nothin’ from you,” she smiled back dangerously with hardened eyes. “This is all I want and it’s all for me.” She purred with a seductively unhinged smirk, her flawlessly manicured nails digging painfully into his neck, making J bite back a groan.

“What makes you think I care what you want?” He grunted defensively, hoping she wouldn’t call him out on his blatant lie. Normally lies were easier to tell than truths, but in the moment, he was too distracted trying not to stare at her shirt sliding to the floor.

“Do you want me to make a list?”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m a person.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m Dr. Quinzelle.” She snapped. “I’m doing this ‘cause I want to, J, whether or not ya believe isn’t my problem.” She laughed, her lips twisting into a near demented grin.

“I…” He began looking at her carefully and like this stranger perched atop his thighs might disappear if he blinked. For the first time he could remember, J found himself truly speechless.

He wasn’t sure who or what the woman in front of him was. He’d poked and prodded at his good doctor for so long hoping to see the monster inside of her. There were few places more dangerous to be than perched on the lap of less than the enthusiastic Joker. The dark voice threatened damnation and the destruction of all his games for letting her touch him, but it was pointless. He knew he couldn’t resist the demon atop his thighs.

He wasn’t a man and he wasn’t so sure she was a woman anymore; they were dangerous ideas that had twisted together to create something hideous.

“Ya might have the power, but right now ya all mine.” She growled while rubbing her face against neck before licking a line from his clavicle to his ear and biting down on the lobe. “All mine.”

In any other context, J would have killed anyone who claimed he was theirs. But in that moment, with this brand-new monster staring up at him with a nearly violent passion, all J could do was groan.

“I’ve wanted you like this for so long.” She murmured to herself, kissing and biting his neck while her nails scratched lines through his unruly green hair and down his back. Tingles shot down his spine as her lips and teeth paid homage to his neck making his cock twitch hard in his pants. Fuck he wanted her. Harley’s hips slowly undulated over him, gracefully grinding herself on him, making her skirt ride up her thighs until it clung to her waist like a belt and exposing a sliver of her matching dark purple panties.

“Fuck.” She gasped, “I’ve wanted you for too long.”

J bit down on his grill as hard as he could. He wasn’t sure what he was stopping himself from doing, making noise or saying something he’d regret, but he knew it was vital he stayed silent. She might have seen the video of him touching himself to her pictures, but he refused to give her an iota more power over him than she already had. But even as he fought to stay silent, he couldn’t keep himself from pressing the hard ridge of his erection against the juncture of her thighs.

Harley’s hands wandered down his chest before she shifted further back on his thighs. J fought to keep a choked noise from escaping his lips while his cock twitched as if chasing her heat. From her new position, he could just make out a triangle of blond curls under the opaque purple lace with a large dark circle from her wetness at the apex of her thighs. He damn near swallowed his tongue in an attempt to stay silent. 

J grunted behind tightly closed eyes as her hand reverently slipped under his Arkham issued sweatpants and boxers to close around his length. Memories of the touch of other people had been blurred into obscurity like most of his other memories. Pleasure for The Joker came in terms of violence. The sensual grip of her hand now stroking long and slow around him was a foreign kind of bliss.

Her hand moved slowly, almost to torturous in its light exploratory strokes. He grunted, clenching his eyes shut and wishing like hell his hands were free so he could touch her. Grab her ass to pull her hard and fast against him. Pull down her bra to watch her breasts jiggle as she ground down on him. It wasn’t a matter of arousal anymore; it was life and death. He had always envisioned a far gorier and amusing death for himself than one by blue balls but as her uncharacteristically endless patience continued, he began to worry it might just have to settle for that fate.

Suddenly she placed her hands back on his shoulders shifted closer to him and her lace covered heat was pressed firmly against his exposed length. J let out a shocked noise of arousal at the otherworldly slick sensation of her pussy dancing along his cock, feeling drips of precum wetting his tip and darkening the expensive lace of her panties.

Her lips moved lower, paying homage to the juncture of his neck and shoulder. The passivity and submissiveness of his position made him want to scream, it was overwhelming and borderline suffocating, but at the same time, he thought he might kill her if she stopped. He needed her too far badly. With a growl, J lunged forward and attacked the thin material of her bra.

“What are…? J! Goddamn it, yes.” She grunted, threading her fingers through his hair and grinding harder against him. J smirked against her breast, reveling in the unfamiliar masculine pride that her desperate noises evoked in him.

There was no lining between the lace cup and her breast making it easy to find her nipple. He sucked and bit relentlessly, groaning helplessly when one particularly aggressive suck made a wave of her moisture coat his cock and her to make a perfectly desperate high pitch moan. He wanted to bottle that noise and play it back over and over again. His balls seemed to agree, clenching tighter to his body each time she made it.

J growled up at her, her nipple between his golden teeth making her grinding hips lose whatever semblance of grace that they originally had. She was fucking beautiful like this. There was no artifice or dishonesty on her face, just raw desperation and pleasure. He didn’t know why she wanted him or why she’d decided to give into whatever had been building between them for months but the dangerous glint in her eyes made it hard for him to care. He sucked harder at her, flicking his tongue over the hardened point of her nipple, and basking in her painful grip on his hair.

She was utter self-destructive chaos. And she was all his. His little monster. She was feral and uncontrollable and selfish and dangerous. Whatever creature Harleen had been didn’t matter anymore, Harley was his monster.

“Yes, J!” She whined like she was getting fucked, seemingly unbothered by the absurdity of grinding on him to climax when just a scrap of fabric and inches of flesh separated them from coming together the way they both so obviously needed. Her hips moved harder and faster, focusing his sensitive tip on her clit making J growl out a moan.

J’s hips bucked against her soaked panties, meeting her stroke for stroke for stroke. They pushed each other harder and faster until it was impossible for him to keep latched to her breasts. Harley lowered her head, still pulling his hair, and pressed her forehead to his.

J clenched his eyes closed, unable to take the intimacy of their position. They were nose to nose, breathing in each other’s gasps. It was dangerously addictive, it was far too human, and he needed it to never stop.

“Fuck.” He muttered quietly, suddenly finding his voice. He could hardly hold back the waves of arousal that crashed over him. Her heat, her wetness, the smell of her sex, the feel of her breath on his lips. Even behind his tightly closed eyes it was overwhelming.

“Yes, J- look at me. Fuck! J, so close. Please, open your eyes…” She began before a gasp cut off her words. J growled harshly, his eyes clenching tighter as her fingers locked in his hair and trapped his face against hers.

“Harley.” J groaned, fighting the clenching in his balls. A loud gasp escaped her lips and her fingers tightening painfully in his hair. Her hips suddenly moved even harder against his, humping his nearly continually leaking cock.

“I’m- please, J!” she began again before her voice trailed off into a high pitch moan. J swallowed roughly, half dying to see her face and half terrified of what he would see if he looked. Curiosity and panic warred in him until she was whimpering nearly constantly and her hips moving almost spastically against him.

He couldn’t help himself.

He slowly pealed his eyes open and attempted to force himself to ignore the discomforting intimacy of their position. Her lips were centimeters from his and twisted in a pained grin. Her eyes were wild and dilated. Her cheeks were bright pink. There was nothing artificial or contrived, just a monster giving into her most dangerous impulses. He knew damn well no one else had ever seen her like this, so raw. So honest. So uninhibited.

“Yesss.” He hissed, his will collapsing like a house of cards, leaning forward to bite her lip with his golden teeth hard enough to draw blood before pulling away and growling almost inaudibly quietly, “come for me, my little monster.”

“J!” She whimpered one last time before her eyes rolled into the back of her head. J didn’t dare blink or even breath for fear he would miss something.

* * *

Harley panted with her forehead resting sweatily against his, attempting to catch her breath even as aftershocks of pleasure rippled through her body. It was almost embarrassingly juvenile to grind herself to orgasm atop her patient, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. No, instead she felt a kind of giddy euphoria she wasn’t sure she’d experience before.

“Harley…” J groaned; his fiery eyes now wide open. “Finish what you started, little monster.” His words were almost a threat but his steadily dripping cock, shiny with her arousal betrayed the source of his agitation. It waved to her, egging her on. She was tempted to lift herself up the few inches to impale herself on his considerable pale length but resisted.

If she ever fucked The Joker, it wouldn’t be like this. It would be far away from Arkham. Far away from Dr. Quinzelle and Harleen. It would be just J and Harley, no one else. And afterwards he wouldn’t leave her.

She wouldn’t let him.

“Harley.” He growled again, the threat in his voice much clearer.

“Oh, do you need something?” She giggled, swinging a leg over him and sinking to her knees with a cocky grin. Harleen had always hated doing this, but it was disgusting as it was effective at controlling her marks. Now she found herself dripping through her panties looking up at her J thinking about what she was going to do.

She wanted all of him. If this was all she was going to get she would take as much as she could.

“Harley,” he groaned. She wasn’t sure if he was repeating her name to urge her to hurry up or was telling her that what he needed was her. She hoped it was the latter. She’d never wanted any one like this. She’d never needed any one like this. She’d never loved anyone like this.

Harley brushed her cheek against his erection teasingly then licked a hot stripe up his inner thigh and bit at the juncture of his hip hard enough to bruise him. His moans urged her on, beckoning her to trace mindless circles on his bizarrely smooth balls before licking her wetness off his length. He tasted like her musky arousal which just made her eyes darker and had her opening her mouth to swirl around the tip like a lollypop.

He was obviously close before she’d even gotten on her knees. His jaw tight and his breathing fast. If he’d had eyebrows they would have been furrowed down and she knew if his hands were free, they would have been fisting her hair.

God he was perfect. The raw strength of his body made her shiver.

When she relaxed her throat and took almost his full length into her mouth, she could hear him stop breathing in an attempt to silence himself. That wouldn’t do.

She would take all she could. Everything he was willing to give.

“What do you need, J? Tell your Harley.” She giggled with an insane cockiness she was rapidly coming to appreciate, running her tongue up and down his length. It was dangerous to poke and prod The Joker, but she couldn’t stop herself. It was far too easy to get addicted to.

“More.” He grunted, throwing his head back, “I need more.”

“More what?” She teased, lowering her mouth suck at his tip while circling his corona with her tongue.

“You. I need you more of you, you bratty little monster.” He growled, flexing his hips hard against her face.

“Well, if that’s all you need…” She giggled, abruptly taking him back into her mouth while sucking hard. Following the pace of his pumping hips, she took him deep and fast.

“Yes, Harley. Just like that.” He grunted roughly, making Harley moan around his cock. She could feel his length twitching hard between her lips and his balls growing tight in her palm. “What a good little monster.” He ground out between clenched teeth, staring down at her with an intensity she could almost feel.

Harley looked up at him, reveling in his uncontrolled expression. J was staring at her with something like awe, only closing his eyes when her tongue ventured to flick at his slit or rub along his length as she took him deeper. His hips bucked faster, and his repressed groans grew deeper in pitch. The bitter flavor of his pre-ejaculate grew more intense as his cock became so hard it was nearly sharp.

Suddenly, a loud groan ripped from J’s throat and his hips bucked hard against her face. Harley smiled around his cock and took him deep, letting his come flood down her throat.

The only time she’d ever felt as powerful as she did swallowing down The Joker was killing Karl and she knew both were something she was utterly addicted to. He was staring down at her with a wicked, dangerous gaze that made her feel half goddess and half demon.

No one else had ever looked at her the way he did.

Giggling, she wondered to herself how on earth she was going to go back to being Dr. Quinzelle for the rest of the day. She could hide her love bites and button up her shirt, but it would be hard to focus in the rest of her sessions while the after taste of The Joker’s come danced on her taste buds.

How could she get up and walk out of the room pretending like she didn’t know what The Joker tasted like? Her jubilant mood suddenly shifted, her hazy arousal fading to something dark and terrifying. She’d have to pretend none of this ever happened.

After he left, she’d be the only one who knew just who Harley was and she’d fade away into nothingness. No one could know just who she was or what she’d done. No one could know what The Joker was to her. No one knew that he was her everything. No one could know that she was _his_ Little Monster.

Even he wouldn’t know that she loved him with whatever was left of her twisted heart.

* * *

J’s head lolled back; she was too much. Harley slowly licked him clean, removing the last traces of his release from his skin before tucking him back into his trousers. With a deep breath his picked up his head and stared down at the monster kneeling between his thighs. It was so fucking tempting to drag her off the floor and show her Gotham’s darkest parts.

He’d never planned for his game to pull the dormant monster out of his doctor to merge with his escape plans, but they’d gradually got tangled together in ways he hadn’t anticipated and turned into something else entirely. It had never been part of his plan but in that moment, it was so fucking easy to imagine what it would be like for her to truly be his. Not just his toy or a game, but his own monstrous companion who played with Gotham by his side.

Harley was rubbing her face against his inner thigh like a cat when she murmured something he couldn’t quiet hear. J pulled himself out of his reverie to stare down. There was something about her expression that didn’t look quite right. She looked delicate and almost scared, though he couldn’t imagine why.

“What did my Little Monster say?” he murmured, confused.

“Don’t leave me.” She repeated, looking up at him with the biggest, bluest eyes he’d ever seen. He’d seen pain and fear on many, many people’s faces over the years. It usually was either amusing or irrelevant to him. But this time the look made that thing he didn’t know he had twist sickeningly inside of himself again.

“I need you.” She murmured, pressing her cheek to his inner thigh.

“You don’t need anything, Harley.” He snapped before he could stop himself, unsure why he hated the pain that flickered in her eyes so much.

“I need you.”

“Harley…” He began uselessly, unsure what he could or should say. It would be more than a lie to say her words didn’t affect him. The caused a near violent rush of something so unfamiliarly giddy rush though his body. Her needing him was the headiest thing he’d ever heard. He wanted to bottle those words and inject them like a drug over and over again and never come down from her high.

“Don’t worry about me leaving yet, little monster.” Joker eventually laughed numbly, “get me what I need and then we’ll talk.”

“Don’t leave me, J.” She demanded, anger sparking in her pleading voice. It was beyond tempting to promise her that he’d take her with him. She was his cruel, dangerous, fascinating Little Monster who he craved in ways he didn’t fully understand. There was so much he could show her, and she’d love every inch of it. And Goddamn it if he didn’t want to.

But J had admitted that to himself a long while ago that while the authorities could capture him and Batman could kill him- his Little Monster was uniquely capable of ruining him.

“We’ll see.” He finally said not at all sure who he was lying to more. Her with tentative promises about taking her with him. Or himself about his ability to walk away from her.

“No.” She growled, suddenly rising up on her knees and grabbing his face in a nearly painful grip. “Don’t give me that, we both know that means nothin’. Pretty, pretty please J. Promise me.”

There was a frantic darkness in her eyes that him want to get lost in the madness that lurked just below the surface and revel in it. It made him want to be utterly consumed by the monster he’d helped unleash. It made him want to kiss her while they burned Gotham to the ground.

“Little Monster….” He began, unable to hide the nearly tortured indecisive note in his voice.

“Please, J, don’t leave me. I fucking need you,” She pleaded, not bothering to wipe her tears off her cheeks, in a voice that was equal parts sadness, desperation, and anger. “Please,” she said quietly, suddenly unable to meet his eyes, “I love you.”

Joker felt his entire body go cold. She was talking, he could see her lips moving, but he couldn’t hear over the ringing in his ears that made him want to vomit. He thought maybe she was saying his name in an attempt to get his attention. It was impossible to tell; he was too far gone to begin to understand what she was saying.

A kind of icy panic had gripped his stomach that made it impossible for him to do anything but laugh. Even he could hear a hysterical note to his voice but was unable to hide it.

He was dimly aware of the siren announcing the door opening and her fleeing to her chair where her lab coat hung, forgotten. Joker didn’t bother to watch her dress; he was too busy laughing through his cold sweat.

Joker barely noticed the guards dragging him somewhere. He didn’t care which guards they were or where they were taking him but assumed it would be his cell. He wasn’t sure why he attacked one of them, he just suddenly found his face covered in blood and his mouth full of a chunk of someone’s flesh. At least the responding beating drowned out echoes of _her_ declaration of love ringing in his mind.

Love. He couldn’t help but gag at the word. It was comically impossible for her to love him; he knew what kind of monster she was, and he knew damn well he wasn’t something that could be loved.

The guards left him cackling into a pool of blood on the floor of his cell. He didn’t mind. He was too busy trying to figure out if he was more furious or terrified. Or somehow if each time he was most of one he suddenly was more of the other.

* * *

She’d fucked up. She knew she’d fucked up.

Harley sat numbly in the therapy room that still smelled vaguely of sex staring blankly at the wall. The guards had seen her swollen bloody lip, rumpled clothes, and glazed expression and had immediately jumped into action. She’d made some sort of excuse; she didn’t really remember what. They hadn’t asked too many follow up questions. It wasn’t the first time they had seen someone like this after a conversation and apparent physical altercation with the Joker. One of them had brought her some ice for her lip and someone had given her a granola bar that sat uneaten on the table in front of her.

Just the idea of eating made her gag. She’d fucked up. Badly.

One of the guards had escorted her back to the wing of officed. If she’d been paying attention, she would have noticed she was being taken to Dr. Reed’s office, but she wasn’t. The older doctor had given her some patronizing lecture on how he’d been waiting for something like this since she started daily sessions with The Joker. He’d gone on and on about how she’d naively put herself at unnecessary risk when she should have just listened to him and done ECT like he’d told her to. She hadn’t really heard him and didn’t particularly care what he said.

She’d ruined everything.

Dr. Reed had abruptly cut himself off and told her she was a sweet girl and to go home. She had dimly wondered what had managed to distract him from his condensing rant but couldn’t bring herself to actually care. She’d made some halfhearted protest about how it was only a split lip and she was fine to go back to work, but Dr. Reed had ushered her out the front door without even giving her time to go back to her office to collect her things.

Harley was fairly sure she’d thanked Dr. Reed for sending her home early, but she was less sure it had sounded sincere. She didn’t really remember walking to her car but somehow, she found herself in the driver seat sobbing without a clear memory of having gotten there.

What had she been thinking?

She wasn’t sure what kind of reaction she’d expected from J. They might have crossed patient-clinician boundaries a long time ago, but it didn’t take much objective analysis for her to know that he wouldn’t respond well to her blurting out her feelings. How many times had she written ‘attachment disorder’ in the margins of her notes in the last months? She knew he wouldn’t believe her.

As a kid she’d always wanted to have a superpower. It usually was something stupid and useless like flying or super strength. Her teenage-self had contented herself with the far less impressive but far more useful ‘superpower’ of manipulating people. She’d gotten everyone from teachers to businessmen to random men at bars to give her things as small as paying her cover fee at a club and large as paying her tuition. She’d never met a person she couldn’t eventually bend to her will.

Except Joker. He was the one person who had everything, who was everything, that she wanted. For a moment she’d actually thought he’d take her with him. Or at least come back for her after a few weeks. But his cold, detached cackles after her admission of love kept ringing in her ears. Oh, she’d been telling the truth when she said she loved him, she loved him as obsessively and completely as a person could, but she knew better than to tell him that. All she wanted was for him to keep her and to let her play along with his games. And she ruined her chance at it.

He was going to leave her. The one person she’d ever let herself need. Unless she did something drastic and did it quickly, she was going to lose him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These two and their emotional/communication skills, amiright? I don’t actually enjoy making my characters suffer and I gotta say the end of this chapter and most of the next weren’t fun to write. Staying cannon with the flashbacks in SS and making the events from the breakout make sense is not my favorite-est part of being a fanfic writer.
> 
> On the note of smut- I know you’ve been deprived of lemons for a whole seven chapters and this was just a baby lemon, but there is (eventually) more to come. Trust me, once we get into Harley and J post-ACE you’ll get your lemons. Those who read my other story know what I’m like… (sorry not sorry)
> 
> See you next wednesday!


	8. Breakout

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harley felt the explosion before she heard it. The ground of the conference room rumbled, and the tacky stock images framed on the wall clattered to the ground. Her coworkers began to panic. At first a few shouted something about an earthquake, but Harley knew better. Once gun shots started ringing out, so did they. The white coat clad academics and dull, suit wearing members of the legal team and HR scattered like ants, fleeing out the doors to whatever exists they could find.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I *clap* hate *clap* this *clap* chapter *clap*. If you are familiar with my last story you know where I’m headed- but the original sin from the breakout is there and I made the choice to stay cannon to SS when I started this story (and have been dreading writing this chapter ever since). So, buckle up, take a deep breath, take care of yourself, and lets do this bitch. (Even though I really, really, really don’t want to.)  
> TW for non-consensual medical procedures literally everything that happens in the breakout

J lay on the floor in a dazed fury.

Of all the absurd, fucked up things how the hell had she concluded that she ‘loved’ him? No amount of hitting his head against the floor made her choice to tell him _that_ make any more sense. Shy of believing that it would make him want to have her tag along on his breakout, he couldn’t understand what her delusional motivation could be. And if she actually thought that was true, then she had an appallingly human view of him. It was disgusting and absurd and infuriating and about a thousand other things.

 _“Including right,”_ sighed Jack.

 _“Oh, shut the fuck up,”_ Letcher laughed, _“we want her for a night but that’s about it.”_

 _“She’s just manipulating you. You’re just a toy to her, a meal ticket to freedom. She’s too weak to do it for herself. Too pathetic. She’s trying to get you to do it for her. She’s just too much of a coward, too human to do it herself.”_ The darkest voice rumbled.

 _“She murdered a friend two days ago for fun just to impress us, I’m pretty sure she’s inhuman enough even by your standards.”_ Jack snapped, _“besides she wants our approval too much to manipulate us like that.”_

 _“How are you that stupid? She’d be even more manipulative to earn our approval. She’s just toying with us,”_ scoffed Letcher.

“Shut the fuck up!” Growled Joker, resuming hitting the back of his head against the floor until the blurry cacophony of voices were silent.

* * *

Harley stared emptily at the now-cold bath she’d been lying in for the last hour or two. Or at least she thought it had been an hour or two, she wasn’t really sure. It was enough time to run out of whatever tears she hadn’t shed on her steering wheel and sober up after drinking what was left of a dark bottle of liquor that she hadn’t bothered to read the label of when she’d finally arrived home.

“And here ya fancied ya’self so good at playing people.” Harley laughed bitterly to herself, trying to take a swig from the bottle in her hand before disappointedly realizing it was empty for the umpteenth time.

“Stupid bitch.” She muttered to herself, sinking below the surface cold water to rest her head on the bottom of the tub. Several inches of water distorted her view of her tiled walls like a fun house mirror, making it look like some hideous abstract art piece. Part of her was tempted to stay there. It was silent. Still. Calm.

 _“Y’just gonna give up then, Harleen?”_ A voice sneered, breaking through the murky underwater silence. Harley jolted up out of the water and slammed the bottle down on the rim of the tub.

“Whose there?” She snarled, holding up the broken bottel like a knife and looking wildly around for the origin of the voice. Several tense minutes passed without anyone materializing or talking, making her laugh nervously.

“Hearing voices and telling Joker you love him on the same day. You’re losing it, Quinzelle.” She muttered anxiously, carefully stepping out of the tub without lowering the bottle.

* * *

J wasn’t sure how long he’d been on the floor muttering to himself, but by the time the next round of guards graced his cell with their presence his legs were numb. 

“Get up and put your hands on the wall.” A loud voice ordered. Joker distantly heard the words but couldn’t really process what they meant let alone what he was supposed to do. “Doctor’s orders. Up and face the wall, Joker.” The voice continued angrily.

Doctor? Joker’s head snapped up. What the fuck did she want now? He wasn’t about to give her a redo of that morning’s conversation. That was the last thing he wanted. His eyes traced dangerously over the unusually large crowd of guards and orderlies outside his cell daring them to enter.

The best way to get out of having to talk to her would probably be to get put in solitary again… though that would fuck up his current breakout plans. But he’d rather be trapped in the asylum for an extra week or two than have to deal with her at the moment. The three guards stepped into his cell making Joker smirk dangerously.

Before Joker could even stand to attack, a needle was shoved into his bicep. He violently jumped to his feet, slamming the head of the guard closest to him into the wall with a delightful crack. The second and third were on him almost instantly trying to tackle him to the ground. Joker began to laugh, hitting and fighting them the whole way down. But as the seconds ticked by his vision blurred and he became dizzy. He gagged, trying to hold down what prison slop he’d forced himself to eat that morning before the catastrophic therapy session while his legs finally gave out and he slumped to the floor.

He was dimly aware of being lifted up and strapped down to a stretcher the orderlies had concealed around the corner from his cell. Then the bed was being moved, making the lights above his head flicker by in a nauseating blur. They were in an elevator going down, down, down. The normal interview room he met with her in was on the same floor as his cell. Where was Harley having him taken?

After some minutes, how long he really couldn’t say, the doors opened. His eyes wildly searched the dank hallway for Harley. Where the fuck was she? The guards said the doctor would be here. Suddenly, the bed took a sharp turn and stopped in a dimly lit room. He could have sworn he vaguely recognized it but couldn’t be sure.

There were people all around him, lifting up his numb body and strapping him down to something cold and hard. J was sure he’d been here before; he’d seen this room. He tried to fight the restraints, but he could hardly move a muscle.

Where was she?

His frantic confusion was quickly superseded by a grim looking older man shining a pen light in his eyes. Joker thought maybe he’d seen that doctor in a previous visit to Arkham, but he couldn’t be sure. The vaguely familiar man in the lab coat murmured something about importance of discretion to the orderlies in a distant voice, but J couldn’t make out individual words. He was too busy straining his ears, searching for Harley’s voice.

Where was she? What was she doing to him? It was impossible to understand what anyone was saying over the loud monotonous beeping from some large machine he could barely see in his peripheral vision.

A thick band of rubber was forced between his teeth and secured around his head while sticky electrodes from various monitors were pressed to his chest. The background noise turned to vague ringing in his ears as, with sinking horror, J understood exactly where he was.

He squeezed his eyes shut, frantically trying to recall his last faded conflicting dreams that were the closest he had to memories while he still had them. The man with a knife telling him to smile. The pregnant woman. The small apartment. The tanks. The woman with a Glasgow grin. The stage lights. The Red Hood. The rich man.

Cold metal was pressed to his head making a jolt of panic course through his veins and vomit rise in his throat. Harleen had ordered this. Muffled, hysterical laughter escaped his gagged mouth. She had promised she wouldn’t do this to him. She promised she wouldn’t take this from him.

He flipped through the dreams again and again, hoping that somehow this time he’d wake up remembering everything he was knocked out knowing. The man with a knife telling him to smile. The pregnant woman. The small apartment. The tanks. The woman with a Glasgow grin. The stage lights. The Red Hood. The rich man.

He knew better than to believe Harleen when she said she wouldn’t do this to him. He knew better, damn it. He knew better than to trust her promises and especially her claims of ‘love.’

A loud switch was flipped, and a buzzing noise filled the room. J grit his teeth and resumed his internal chant. The man with a knife telling him to smile. The pregnant woman. The small apartment. The tanks. The woman with a Glasgow grin. The stage lights. The Red Hood. The rich man.

A sudden intense pain jolted his skull. And then there was nothing.

* * *

Harley wondered absently if this was what heartbreak felt like. She’d never felt it before. Oh, she’d felt more than her share of pain, anger, loneliness, despair, and that nagging feeling of worthlessness. But never because of this. The sting of his dismissive rejection burned deep and hot into her mind, leaving her stomach churning.

She’d never been in love before. Lying on her bedroom floor- unable to think of solutions through her cutting pain, hearing his laughter echoing in her ears- she couldn’t help but think that was for the best.

Love was a dangerous game for her to play, especially with The Joker. But no matter how stupid, she couldn’t help loving him anymore than she could keep her tears from running numbly down her face. She would give anything to keep him but the only thing she had to give him was herself and he didn’t want that.

He’d asked her for a machine gun. And she’d promised to get him one before she bothered to think, then she had him under her hands and between her thighs and she couldn’t have thought to save her soul- then she went and ruined everything with her thoughtlessness. In the moment the only thing she’d been able to fear was him leaving her, but in the cold of her apartment she began to wonder just what the hell she had agreed to.

Harley rested her forehead on her knees, still shivering. It wasn’t like she’d be the one doing the killing. And who knows, maybe he’d just threaten people with the gun and wouldn’t actually get around to shooting anyone.

 _“If ya gonna do this, do this, princess. Don’t be lyin’ to ya self ‘bout it.”_ Harley wasn’t sure if she’d said, thought, or imagined the words but they made her breath devolve into uneven gasps.

His last break out had killed almost twenty people and destroyed a whole wing of the hospital. Harley numbly wondered how many he’d kill this time if she went and armed him.

Her hypocrisy made her laugh. Hadn’t she just enjoyed killing a man a handful of days before? It wasn’t as if she was innocent. Why should aiding and abetting in the murder of her coworkers make her pause? She didn’t feel anything close to guilty about Karl.

Yes, Karl was just one person and this would easily endanger a hundred people. And while she had killed him unprovoked, she had actually wanted him dead. She might not enjoy her coworkers, but she didn’t actually want them dead (well… most of them). Sure, they were boring, but they had lives and families and mortgages and dogs and whatever else nice normal people had.

 _“Why should they get t’have nice, boring happy lives, we dinn’it,”_ someone pouted jealously, though Harley couldn’t be sure who and she didn’t particularly care. A flash of anger rose up in her, shocking her out of her tears with an ugly scowl.

Why should she have to sacrifice her chance at getting everything she wanted for them to get their boring happily ever after? Her coworkers weren’t better or more deserving than her. Their lives weren’t more important that hers. It wasn’t her problem if on the way to getting what she wanted she inadvertently enabled their murder.

The only thing that mattered was that J didn’t stop looking at her like she was half demon and half goddess and all his. She’d do anything to keep the ecstatic high she found atop his lap that afternoon. As long as he in all his perfect, fucked up, dangerous and fascinating glory still wanted her for her ugliest parts, nothing else was relevant.

She would sacrifice anything and anyone who got in her way if it meant keeping him. Something as irrelevant as ‘right and wrong’ wasn’t about to stop her from trying to fix things the fragile relationship they had. It wasn’t as if giving him the gun would fix everything, but at least it would be something. It would have to be enough.

It would have to be.

That left her with only one pressing question: where the hell would she find a machine gun? She wasn’t entirely sure what the process for getting a gun license was but was fairly certain she couldn’t even get a handgun, let alone a machine gun, within the next few days.

A week ago, if she’d been asked to get a gun for him, she would have just gone to Karl… but given that Karl was currently being swept out to sea somewhere at the bottom of Finger River that was hardly a viable option. The outlaw biker gang he rode with had more than enough connections to get her what she needed but poking around the friends of the man she killed seemed like tempting fate too much even by her standards.

The only person she could think to ask for the gun would be J and he definitively did not want to speak with her. Her mind began to spin with what he might think of her, creating scenario after scenario of rejection.

“Focus.” She snapped, slapping herself hard across the face and rising to pace her bedroom. Her wet towel slid to the floor with a thump, but if she noticed the rush of air against her nude goose bumped skin, she didn’t show it. There was no time for self-pitying anxiety. There was only much time left to repair things with J and she wasn’t going to waste it worrying. She needed to find someone who could get her the gun and get it to her quickly that wasn’t affiliated with him.

Harley froze in thought mid-stride. She couldn’t go to J directly, but she could go to his men. If they were already working to get him out, they would probably know her role in his breakout. They would want him armed for it and would be motivated to get the gun to her quickly.

It was a genius plan with the small problem of she had no idea how to find his men.

Harley absent mindedly began to dress in an outfit that Harleen wouldn’t dream of being caught wearing in her apartment building. It was far too dark and tight to suit Dr. Quinzelle. She knew that J had a strip club in Otisburg, but just barging in and demanding someone give her a machine gun seemed impossibly stupid.

She didn’t have a plan when she stepped on to the elevator but knew she needed to get out of her apartment while she could still think. Maybe she could find a useful number on his phone, she wondered absently while snapping and popping her gum anxiously. He spent so much time emailing and texting, there had to be someone who knew what was going on in his contacts. But the idea of him catching her sneaking into his cell to steal his phone seemed like an even worse idea than barging into his club unannounced.

Harley froze with a laugh as the elevator door opened on the lobby, maybe she didn’t need to go looking for one of J’s men after all. Tuck stood slouched in the corner looking like he was fighting to stay awake (and was losing that particular battle).

She gritted her teeth, there was no better option. This was possibly the stupidest thing she’d done all week, including killing Karl, but she couldn’t think of another way to get her peace offering for J. Taking a deep breath, she sauntered across the nearly deserted lobby.

“Walk with me.” She said in a clipped tone that she hoped masked her nerves, walking without stopping past Tuck. The man made a surprised indecisive noise. Harley held her breath as she walked out the front door, unsure if he would follow or not. If he didn’t, she was fucked. There wasn’t a plan B if he didn’t follow her.

She let out a loud sigh of relief about a block later when she heard the loud stomping sounds of him jogging begin her.

“Do you have a place we can talk where we can’t be heard?” She asked while popping her gum without turning to look at him.

“Frost gave me a car, but I can’t promise it’s not bugged,” he shrugged in bewilderment.

“I would assume it was if I were you,” she laughed emptily, hiding her confusion about just who Frost was by blowing a large bubble. “But for this conversation it doesn’t matter if any of your friends overhear.”

“Er, well I’m parked ‘bout a block away.”

“Lead the way, hotstuff.” She said with false calm. The five-minute walk was tense, Tuck obviously confused as to why the subject of his spying was talking to him and Harley trying to figure out what she was going to say.

“This is me,” he grunted at the revolting green car.

“I know. You are terrible at blending in.” She laughed. Getting in the car with one of The Joker’s goons was unbelievably stupid but she couldn’t bring herself to be afraid. The only thing that really scared her anymore was losing J and if getting to keep him involved getting in the car- so she’d do it gladly. “Drive.”

“What do you want?” Tuck eventually asked, pulling out of his spot.

“Well your boss asked me for a machine gun and little ol’ me don’t know how to get one.”

“What?” Tuck demanded, turning sharply to look at her and almost jerking the car into a telephone pole in the process.

“Jesus, Tuck. Eyes on the road.” Harley rolled her eyes and stuck her gum behind her ear with false indifference. “You heard me.”

“You want _me…_ to get _you…_ a _machine gun…_ for _The Joker_?” Tuck asked slowly in a disbelieving voice.

“Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.” It was refreshing not to have to lie about her motives. And it was very amusing to watch his confusion. She hadn’t tried anything like that before and it made her monster growl to life and demand her attention.

“Why?” He all but shouted, once again nearly veering the car into oncoming traffic. “I mean, you’re a doctor, like just a normal lady- just… what the fuck?

“Do you need me to drive?” Harley snorted, trying to suppress her monster’s urge to stab him for calling her normal.

“No,” he grumbled quietly.

“If you get us killed before I get your boss what he asked me for he’ll find some way to bring you back and kill you again and I’m pretty sure his way of killin’ you would hurt way more than a car accident.”

“How do I know you’re really working for us now?” Tuck asked, suddenly turning on his tough guy persona that she assumed he had somewhere in there. “How do you I know you’re not going to go to the cops?”

“Why would I do that? If I wanted to have you arrested, I could have called the cops on you for stalking weeks ago.” Harley sighed. Tough guy, maybe, but smart guy- very much not.

“Maybe Mr. J threatened you and you were too scared to call the cops.” Tuck grunted looking less than convinced.

“And an illegal arms charge would keep me safer from you than a stalking charge how?” She scoffed, before crossing her arms. She could see that Tuck wasn’t going to believe her without some prodding. “You remember Karl?” She asked.

“Yeah, what’s that got to do with anything?”

“I killed him this weekend after I saw you on the train.” She said evenly with no expression on her face. Tuck attempted to conceal his surprise but was only marginally successful. At least that time he managed not to almost crash the car.

“Why?”

“I was bored, and J asked me to do something funny.” She giggled to herself in real amusement for the first time since that morning.

Tuck abruptly swerved off the highway and screeched to a halt in an empty construction site. He looked at her carefully for the first time. His face was twisted into some combination of confusion, worry, disbelief, and horror. Harley thought it was a good look on him.

“When do you need the gun by?” He eventually asked.

“Soon as possible.”

“Let me make a few calls.” Tuck sighed. He threw open his door and pulled his massive frame from the comparatively tiny car. Harley sat there, propping her feet on the dash and popping her gum back in her mouth, and blowing large pink bubbles while watching the man pace back and forth while talking on his phone to someone named Frost.

About fifteen minutes later the man got back in the car and looked at her cautiously.

“Frost is meeting us at the Dixon Docks in an hour. He’ll have what you need. We’ll get him out on Wednesday.” He sighed with a shake to his head. “I really fucking hope you know what you’re doing Harleen.”

* * *

Joker awoke slowly. His head was throbbing and his stomach churning from what seemed like the hangover from hell. It wasn’t exactly unheard of for him to finish a bottle of liquor by himself, so his initial theory was more than plausible. But as his eyes adjusted to the dim light of his cell, his theory fell apart.

He rubbed his throbbing head trying to remember what he’d done do make himself feel so awful. Suddenly, flickering images from the night before hit him like a ton of bricks. The details were blurry but he could remember the guards coming to get him on ‘doctor’s orders,’ being restrained, and he remembered the pain. The burning, tingling sensation of electricity ripping through his body. It wasn’t the first time someone at Arkham had put the juice on him, but he’d thought he’d gotten lucky this time.

Lucky. He laughed bitterly to himself. Why would he think that? He wasn’t lucky. There was no such thing as luck. There was only chaos.

Chaos. There wasn’t a better word for the confused tangle of thoughts in that moment. He closed his eyes and pointlessly tried to recall his last few, faded ‘memories’ from before he was The Joker. Those memory-like dreams, as muddled as they were, were touch stones he self-indulgently caressed every now and then.

He was fairly sure that he used to remember something about foreign lands and big guns because he’d often joke that The Joker had been born with military grade weapons in his hands. But he couldn’t actually remember why that joke was funny or if it had even made sense.

He could recall ordering a few blurry underlings to research a gang leader called the Red Hood and was pretty sure he’d done that because he had half remembered dreams about the man. But couldn’t recall those anymore either.

He knew for a fact that he had once remembered people. Even if their names and stories were gone, he’d at least had their faces. Or maybe it was just one person? Maybe it was just one face, though he thought maybe there had been a few but it was hard to say. But no matter how desperately he searched his mind, he found himself utterly unable to imagine them anymore.

He could take the anger, the confusion, and the physical pain of ECT. He couldn’t take the memory loss. His fragmented memories were his and no one could take those from him. Having Dr. Quinzelle be the one to take them made him feel something indescribable. Anger, yes. That was an old friend he knew very well. But it made an odd, unfamiliar pain spread through his chest that he couldn’t quite identify.

Memories of the days before were hazy but parts were singed into his mind. He would never forget the way Harley’s face had twisted in ecstasy as she came atop his cock or the desperate gleam in her eyes when she told him she loved him. Claiming to need him, claiming to _love_ him.

Joker growled, sitting up the rest of the way on his cot with a detached murderous glaze in his eyes. Harleen had never reacted terribly well to being told no. The only question was if the ECT been a tool to punish him after he’d refused to bring her with him or if had it been an attempt to erase his memory of her foolishly claiming to love him.

Harleen was a skilled manipulator, she might partially be his monster, but she was dangerous long before they’d met. He’d be an idiot to think she wasn’t using him.

She was good, he conceded furiously. Harleen had crafted the perfect character for him, tricked him into being fascinated by “Harley.” That phantom was the perfect constellation of lies. Just like everything else about the other parts Harleen played. She’d tried to butter him and pled for him to take her with him on her knees using her usual bag of tricks. God knows how many men she claimed to need or love just to make them easier to manipulate.

She was using him, helping break him out of Arkham on the condition he broke her out of her chains.

He couldn’t tell if he was more furious that she used the same trick on him as she used on mere men or furious that she’d thought the thing he would want most that she could offer to him was her ‘love.’

Harley was dead to him. She was a character Harleen had played as much as she played Dr. Quinzelle. And the next time he was alone with her, he would leave her as broken as he was before he killed Harleen and left her just as dead as Harley.

* * *

Harley sat on her bed staring at her bag. It was so boring- for the most part. A computer. A stack of files. A notebook. A peace-offering in the form of disassembled machine gun.

The dull bearded man at the pier, Frost, had produced a small black box full of silver machinery that he assured her J would be able to assemble quickly. He’d looked at her just as curiously as Tuck had but he’d kept his opinions to himself. She suspected that was why he was Tuck’s boss and not the other way around.

Harley looked at her reflection critically. She didn’t look different. Same make up. Same straightened hair pulled back into a tedious ponytail. The only real difference was that she’d chosen to wear a red silk shirt, Dr. Quinzelle didn’t typically wear bright colors. But it was her last day at the office. Might as well enjoy herself.

It was odd, she thought, driving to work. She was stuck in the same traffic on Grand Avenue that lightened up as always once she reached Leob Bridge. It was the same route she’d driven hundreds of time. But this was her last time. No matter what happened, if The Joker took her with him, if he killed her, if the police caught her- she wasn’t coming back. There was no future for Dr. Harleen Quinzelle.

She parked her car in the same spot she did every day and walked through the doors, making a point to smile brightly at the security guards and ask them about their morning as always. Word had gotten around about her ‘being attacked’ by The Joker the day before and half of her coworkers greeted her with concerned smiles and words of encouragement. The other half looked at her disdainfully wondering why she had gotten to work with The Joker not them. She passed the same series of offices, though this time she couldn’t help but wonder just how many of the coworkers she passed would be returning home that night.

Instead of taking the elevator to her office she turned and walked to the inmate housing. It was odd for her to check on a patient before putting away her things, but not unheard of. The night shift guards on The Joker’s floor barely glanced at her, alarmingly distracted by conversations about a game they’d all watched the day before.

She approached his cell anxiously, unsure how he’d react to her presence. The last time she’d seen him had gone poorly to say the least. But no one said loving a more-than-slightly narcissistic sadist with apparent reactive attachment disorder and more than a sprinkle of sociopathy would be easy. With a deep breath, she raised her hand to knock on his cell bars to alert him to her presence.

Joker didn’t react to her at first. He was seated on his bed, his green head lowered and staring at the floor. There was something about his vacant expression that struck Harley as odd, she was used to his mind wandering away but something in his eyes looked almost dead.

“J…” she began, unsure what she was going to say. It seemed to take him several moments hear to her words and a few moments more to formulate a response.

“Dr. Quinzelle, to what do I owe the pleasure.” He crooned in a hauntingly mocking tone without turning to look at her. She tried not to flinch at her name, something about her old title coming from his lips made her want to scream.

“J, I’m sorry, the other day… it went wrong.” She sighed, shifting her heavy purse. The night before she’d come up with all kind of things to say to him but in the moment all she could do was quietly murmur, “I meant every word.”

“How charming,” he laughed darkly. “Did the good doctor just stop by to say how sorry she was?”

“No… I got you something.” She reached into her purse and pulled out the black box. “Frost says you know how to put it together.”

Joker stood and walked over to her slowly, looking at her like he wasn’t quite sure she was real. He took the box and looked at it like it might be a trap, though why he was so suspicious she couldn’t say.

“I would ask how you know Frost, but I suspect he’ll tell me himself very soon.” Joker murmured, taking the box and turning his back on her in a clear attempt to end the conversation.

“J, I have to go. I have meetings with Dr. Reed, some higher ups, and a bunch of people from HR about the incident yesterday. I’ll be in the conference room in the subbasement for the next few hours...” She trailed off hoping he would say something about seeing her there later. He didn’t

“Please J,” she whispered, “I don’t understand what happened but I’m sorry, please don’t leave me like this.”

“You know exactly what happened.” He growled, spinning around and looking her in the eye for the first time that morning. The blatant violence in his eyes made her jump, he hadn’t looked at her like that for months. Harley looked at him in complete confusion, making Joker laugh in a way that was almost painful to listen to, “Don’t think just because you didn’t have the stomach to watch it in person doesn’t mean I don’t know you ordered it.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about J,” Harley pleaded, wishing desperately she had the time to get him to explain what the fuck he was talking about. “I’m late, I have to go. Just please J... Just please.” She turned on her heal and fled down the hall trying not to cry.

* * *

Joker sat in his cell alternately staring at the fifteen or so emails he’d received the night before from Frost and the black box resting in his bunk. In less than an hour he’d be a free man. He could say goodbye to the asylum and be rid of the tedious people inside it. He wouldn’t ever have to see Dr. Quinzelle again and could condemn her to the oblivion of his ever-fading memory. He wouldn’t have to relive her lies, her manipulations.

He scrolled though the pictures of her his spy had taken. From the very first dull picture of her on her college gymnastics team, to the deliciously distracting images of her fighting, to the fraying at the edges version he’d seen lately. She was beautiful in her madness. Whatever else she was, her monster was captivating. It was just too bad it was wasted on Harleen.

He couldn’t believe he’d ever considered taking her with him.

An alert blinked on his phone, a text from Frost. “Subbasement entrance breached. B there < 5 min.” Joker clenched his jaw and opened the box; it was time to play.

“Harleen is mine. Slappy knows where to put her. Open season on everyone else.” He quickly texted back before returning his phone to the pocket of his Arkham sweatpants and stripping off his shirt.

Whoever he was when he was near Harley needed to die. There was only space for The Joker now.

* * *

Harley felt the explosion before she heard it. The ground of the conference room rumbled, and the tacky stock images framed on the wall clattered to the ground. Her coworkers began to panic. At first a few shouted something about an earthquake, but Harley knew better.

Once gun shots started ringing out, so did they.

The white coat clad academics and dull, suit wearing members of the legal team and HR scattered like ants, fleeing out the doors to whatever exists they could find. Harley stood and walked slowly, stepping over bodies as she went, she wasn’t sure where she was going. She didn’t have a plan. She’d gotten J his gun, her job was done. He would either take her with him or not, she had no control of what he would do next.

She wasn’t looking for him per say, but as she wandered through the smoke-filled halls her eyes scanned for a shock of green hair and pale skin. All around her she heard screams, gunfire, and pleading but she couldn’t make herself feel fear. In fact, she didn’t feel anything at all.

She was about to turn a corner into the main atrium of the subbasement when a tall spindly man dressed in what appeared to be a black and white mime costume tackled her to the floor. Harley fought back without thinking, hitting and shoving the man. She began to laugh though she couldn’t really say why.

“Harleen! The fuck are you doing?” A clipped voice called pulling her from her daze. Tuck stormed over and grabbed her by her hair. “Slappy, grab her legs. Where does he want her?”

The mime gestured to the left with his jaw. They dragged her for several minutes down the hall, kicking and swearing, to a room she’d never been in before dropping unceremoniously onto a table. Tuck held her down by the throat while looking to the strange man to her left.

“Slappy, get her legs.” Tuck barked, the mime nodded enthusiastically and began binding her legs and arms before running off to tinker with some unseen machinery. “Shut the hell up and you might survive.” Tuck looked at her a moment longer as if he wanted to say something more before turning on his heal and charging out the room, the mime followed close behind.

Harley looked around wildly, where the fuck was she? She hadn’t spent much time in Arkham’s subbasement, she’d only really been down there for meetings when the nicer conference rooms were full. There were all kinds of machines all around her. The only one she recognized was one she knew had been used for ECT, but the rest were seemingly junk.

Tuck and the strange mime had locked her in a glorified storage closet. If she ever got out of there, she was going to kill both of them. Slowly.

Minutes ticked by and the gun fire started to die down making panic flood her.

J was going to leave without her and without saying goodbye. He was going to disappear from her life. She was going to be left a shell of the person he’d shown her she could be. She could barely breathe.

Pure, unadulterated panic began to swell through her when she heard a voice she’d never thought to hear again. 

“Well, well, well what do we have here?” Joker crooned, from somewhere behind her.

* * *

Joker looked down at the table he’d been strapped to the night before having his mind rearranged at the behest of his precious doctor who now laid helpless before him. He wasn’t sure they’d be able to find her in the chaos let alone deliver her to the room he’d ordered. Slappy and whoever the other goon was would have to be rewarded. Money, drugs, it didn’t really matter. That wasn’t his problem just now. His problem was debating what to do next.

“I did everything you said, I helped you.” She insisted desperately, pulling him out of his spiraling thoughts. Help? Joker laughed before he could stop himself. She wasn’t helping him. She was destroying him, robbing him of his memories, making him want disgustingly human things.

“You helped me by erasing my mind, what few faded memories I had.” He slammed his fist against the table on either side of her head before tempering his rage and tearing his hands violently through his hair “No. You left me a black hole of rage and confusion. Is that the medicine you practice, Dr. Quinzelle.” He asked, snapping the latex glove loudly onto his hand.

He hated that he still noticed that she flinched at the usage of her title. He hated it even more when her voice slipped out of it’s perfectly manicured Dr. Quinzelle tone and into Harley’s accent. Joker wasn’t sure if the way her voice changed was out of fear or some manipulative ploy to remind him of her monster. Either way it infuriated him and made him grab the electrodes Slappy had left by the top of the bed hard enough for his knuckles to crack.

“What are you gonna do to me? You gonna kill me Mista J?” She asked with an alarming lack of fear. He glared down at her, staring at her piercing eyes. Slappy had equipped him with enough voltage to do whatever he wanted. If he turned it up enough, he could burn her beyond recognition. If he pressed the electrodes in just the right place, he had enough to kill her.

 _“Kill her.”_ The dangerous voice he never named growled, _“she tried to trap you, tried to trick you. Whatever little game you were playing with her is over.”_

“What?” J asked the voice, unsure if he believed it. Killing her would be easy. He’d murdered too many times to count and done it just about every way he could imagine (and he was imaginative if nothing else).

“ _Don’t stop. Erase her memory. Burn her until she smokes. Go until her heart stops.”_ The voice hissed in approval. J looked down at his monster and realized with horror that he couldn’t do it. While he couldn’t keep her, he couldn’t destroy her either. Death was too final for a creature like Harley.

“No I’m not gonna kill ya. I’m just gonna hurt ya, really really bad.” J threatened, holding the electrodes above her face to watch her reaction. She didn’t so much as blink making J growl in rage. Why wouldn’t she react like any other of his victims, god damn it? Why wouldn’t she just disappoint him the way he needed her to? Prove that she wasn’t a monster, that she was just another ant he could crush under his foot and walk away without a second glance.

“Ya think so? Well I can take it.” She said levelly looking him dead in the eye, no trace of begging or fear in her voice. She’d never feared him enough, now her reckless lack of self-preservation rose to new heights in her taunts.

He grabbed a strap and forced it between her teeth to shut her up. Those perfect fucking teeth that she’d lied and manipulated other men in to buying for her just the way she’d lied and manipulated him.

“I wouldn’t want you to break those perfect porcelain capped teeth when the juice hits your brain.” He growled, picking up the electrodes again.

_“Show her what was playing with. She’s strapped down for you, she can’t stop you.”_

He tightened his grip on the handles and gritted his teeth.

_“Do it.”_

He growled to himself and forced himself to press the electrodes to her skin. In the space of seconds her perfect eye eyes rolled into the back of her head, hiding the determined fire he’d been watching grow for months. Her jaw seized closed, shutting the lips that had uttered the only interesting word’s he’d ever heard someone other than himself say. Her restrained body that had tempted and intrigued him began to convulse.

Without thinking, J ripped the electrodes from her skin while choking back vomit.

He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t hurt her like that anymore than he could kill her.

“Get out.” He snarled at the various henchmen who’d been circulating in the room. With a quiet nod the heavily armed men hurried out. Where exactly they went, what they were going to do, J couldn’t say and he didn’t particularly care.

J lowered his ear to her face and let out a sigh of relief. She was still breathing. He wasn’t sure how long he’d electrocuted her but, other than being unconscious, there were no signs of injury. The air didn’t smell like burnt flesh and he didn’t see any signs blisters or cratered skin. 

Harley would hate him for what he’d done but at least she’d live. Maybe she’d try to kill him, he thought with a sad smile. He leaned over her unconscious form and pushed her back hair from her face. One last look before he left.

He pressed a kiss to her forehead, leaving a dark red mark that he didn’t bother wiping away. And stormed out of the room leaving the creature he was when he was with her behind alongside her unconscious body.

* * *

Harley woke slowly to the sounds of beeping monitors. Her body hurt. Her mouth tasted like stale vomit. She slowly blinked, attempting to bring the blurry room into focus. It seemed too bright, too loud.

“You’re awake. Nurse!” A familiar voice called that she couldn’t quiet place.

Harley murmured something incoherent, though if it was an attempt at words or just a general noise of dissent it was hard to say.

“Harleen, can you hear me? It’s me, Dr. Reed. You’re at Elliot Memorial Hospital.” Dr. Reed whispered softly. Harleen blinked slowly, attempting to bring the room into focus.

“What?” She croaked at the blurry figure, “why you’re here?” 

“You didn’t have anyone listed in your emergency contacts, so the wife and I are taking turns sitting with you. How do you feel?”

“Con’fused.” She slurred, “wha happened?”

“That’s completely normal, it will get better with a good night’s sleep. Do you remember anything from this morning?”

“This morn’in?” She repeated carefully, thinking hard. For a moment there was nothing but as she focused little slivers came back. Delivering the gun. J refusing to look at her. The explosion. The gunfire. Tuck strapping her down. Then J… oh god. J. She could distantly hear her heart monitor start beeping faster as she lost herself in memory.

“I’m so sorry, Harleen.” Dr. Reed murmured placatingly, placing a hand on her wrist. She stared blankly at the greyish hospital ceiling tiles unable to recreate the façade she’d built that The Joker had torn down. J was gone. He’d hurt her and then he left her. He left her.

“I’ve already talked to HR, you can have all the time you need before you come back. Once you come back we’ll match you with lower level, nonviolent patients.” Dr. Reed continued, seemingly unaware of how preoccupied Harley had become.

“Why would I do’that?” What would be the point of returning when he was gone? What was the point of anything without him?

“I know you must be scared, Harleen. But this will never happen again. I promise.”

“Promise?” She laughed, turning to face him. “If ya really think you can promise me safety that then ya stup’der than I thought. Nunofus have control.”

“Harleen,” he said sharply, looking taken aback before shaking his head. “You’ve been traumatized, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought this up at all. Well talk about this later when you meet with HR and the legal team.”

“When I do what?” She asked numbly. She wasn’t going back. She couldn’t. Dr. Quinzelle was dead and gone. There was no going back. And certainly, there was no going back to the place when her J had left her.

“I know today has been incredibly difficult, but you can still make a real difference, Harleen. You have so much potential to do good for others.” He continued in his most paternalistic voice as if she hadn’t spoken at all.

“Do good for who?” Harley asked, her laugh bordering on hysterical. If only he knew what she’d done. She’d didn’t do good. She’d given The Joker a gun and let him massacre her coworkers with the insane hope he wouldn’t leave her. And then he had. And he hurt her on his way out.

“Who?” He asked, obviously shocked. “You can relieve the suffering of our patients for one. And you can help our patients become competent enough to stand trial and be tried in a court of law. Don’t you want to give victims and their families that opportunity?”

“Victims.” She spat bitterly. “What victims?”

“Harleen!” He gasped, horrified. “Tell that to the people who’ve been stolen from, beaten within an inch of their lives, kidnaped, and murdered by the inmates!” He shouted before taking a deep breath.

“I’m sorry Harleen, that was unprofessional. Forgive me. You went through hell today and you could have a TBI or God knows what else. You don’t know what you’re saying, and you’re scared of coming back.” He took another deep breath before taking her hand. Harley gritted her teeth and tried to pull her hand away in disgust, but he only gripped her wrist harder.

“I know you want to help our patients, even if you don’t think so right now. I also know that what happened today will never happen again. I will make sure you’re safe.” He condescended making Harley bite back a growl. “There are larger reforms we’re working on we’d love to have your input on, but at least for now we’re making small changes.” Harley turned away, prompting Dr. Reed to talk faster in an eager attempt to recapture her attention. “The board is scheduled to vote on one tonight already that’s all but guaranteed to pass.” He pressed sounding altogether too smug while gripping her hand with bruising force. “Starting tonight, all violent offenders will be placed in solitary observation after ECT so that we can make sure that they aren’t having any violent or threatening behavioral side effects.”

Harley laughed, was that really his peace offering? The hospital was already supposed to be doing that and it’s not as if it was something she particularly cared about. Why should she? Even _if_ she was considering coming back to Arkham (which she wasn’t) or if the reason she wasn’t going to go back was because she was afraid (which it wasn’t), any new rules about ECT were irrelevant to what had happened to her. She never would have let anyone get remotely close to her J with those electrodes- his memories were too fragile and too important to him. Out of her peripheral vision, Harley noticed Dr. Reed’s smug expression faltering, flickering to a guilty one, before he nervously opened his mouth.

“I know it wouldn’t have stopped what happened today… but maybe if he hadn’t just been treated, maybe he wouldn’t have hurt so many…” Dr. Reed muttered to himself, pinching the bridge of his nose with his free hand looking like he was holding back tears. “Damn it, I should have known better. I’m so, so sorry Harleen”

“Whatdya mean he’d jus’ been treated?” Harley asked blearily, attempting to sit up.

“Don’t get up, you need rest.” He urged, wiping his eyes on the back of his hand and finally letting his painful grip of her hand loose.

“What are you talkin’ ‘bout? I din’t order ECT.” She demanded, feeling a sinking, panicked sensation in her stomach.

“I know, I know.” Dr. Reed lamented while wringing his hands, “I was going to tell you in our meeting today before... well, just before. It’s just what with how he attacked you earlier this week- I know you were opposed to ECT, but it’s been effective in the past. Your experimental protocol was probably going to be shut down anyway, Mr. Wayne’s agreement not to veto it was conditional on there being no incidents. I promised him that I would address any violent episodes personally. So… I did.”

“You did what?” Harley shouted, not bothering to hide her shocked anger. A wave of furry overwhelmed her. Dr. Reed had ordered ECT against her wishes on J after she’d promised him that he wouldn’t have to go through it again. Dr. Reed hurt her J, he stole his memories. He was the one who left that detached, furious glaze in J’s eyes.

“I know, I should have told you beforehand… but you were so shaken up and then he attacked several guards after I sent you home. I _had_ to step in. Who gives a damn about The Joker being upset about a few side effects when the safety of our staff is at risk? I know that’s not politically or ethically correct, but damn it I couldn’t sit by and do nothing.”

“Aw, look.” Harley cooed viciously, “there goes your compassionate exterior. I always wondered how deep it went.”

“Harleen!” He gasped looking at her like she’d just slapped him.

“Get out.” Harley spat between clenched teeth.

“Harleen, please-” He stammered.

“Get out,” she snarled again. Something dangerous flashed in her eyes that made Dr. Reed’s deep olive complexion go a sickly pale. “Now.” He grabbed his brief case off the floor and pulled his jacket off the back of his chair so hard that chair flipped and clattered to the floor as he fled from her room.

All Harley could do was laugh. And once she started, she couldn’t stop. Several nurses ran to her room at the commotion. They were speaking to her, but she couldn’t understand them.

Dr. Reed hurt the most beautiful, twisted mind in the world. And he’d done it in a way that made J think she’d been the one to order it.

She could hear the nurses telling her something in forced, calm voices but she didn’t care. J thought she’d betrayed him. And he’d hurt her for it. Then he’d left her.

The nurses were rolling her onto her side, still laughing. Harley dimly felt the rustle of her hospital gown being rucked up over her hip. There was a slight sting in her left glute and a small rush of cool fluid injected deep inside her muscle, but she barely felt it.

It was all Dr. Reed’s fault.

The room started to get dark and blurry but as she slipped into unconsciousness, she could still her rumbles of near hysterical laughter tearing out of her throat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yup. I hated that. A lot. The reality is, while I can eventually write an egalitarian and healthy-as-these-two-are-capable-of relationship, the Harley & Joker origin story is fucked up. I can’t make the breakout ok. I want you to know that this is not where their relationship is going and that even **I** still feel uncomfortable with the content of this chapter (she says having written a chapter she posted a few weeks ago where Harley tortures someone to death….listen we’re all allowed to have our idiosyncrasies ok?)


	9. Chase

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Don’t.” He growled, snatching her wrist out of the air mid-reach, preventing her from touching him. He couldn’t stand her words and her touch. It was too much. Too overwhelming.  
> “I love you!” She begged. J flinched; it was too tempting to believe her lies.  
> “Get out.”  
> “I love you.” She repeated, looking at him determinedly in the eye. Joker shoved her away from him and stormed out of VIP without looking back. If she wouldn’t leave, he would. He needed to get away from her lies before the cracks in The Joker truly started to show.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We’re getting close to the end of this story! Just one more chapter after this. How the hell is this already almost over? 
> 
> More TWs than usual for this one: binge drinking, kidnapping, torture, murderous couples threatening to kill each other. You know, normal healthy stuff.

Harley stared blankly at the scrubs the hospital provided for her. Her own clothes had been collected as evidence by the police shortly after the ambulance carrying her had arrived at the hospital. Yet another costume for her to put on. Yet another role for her to play.

She hated how the hospital staff spoke to her. They used gentle, hushed voices in pacifying tones like she would shatter under the least bit of pressure. It made her want to grab them by the neck and show them just how fragile she really was.

If only they knew. She was more powerful than they could imagine. Just in the past week, she’d killed a man, engaged in arms dealing with the most dangerous gang in Gotham, had played an instrumental role in what the press had dubbed the Arkham Massacre, and sucked off The Joker and had lived to tell the tale. It was laughable and infuriating that anyone pitied her. They should fear her.

Harley had been arguing with the nurses to let her leave since she’d come to after Dr. Reed had fled her room. They’d had cited concerns about her returning to her home alone with no one to monitor after she’d been electrocuted with an unknown voltage. She’d protested loudly, pointing out her unremarkable EEG and stable echocardiogram, but she’d fallen into a fitful sleep while waiting for the doctors to prepare her discharge paperwork. She stormed out of the hospital in the early morning hours as soon as she’d woken without bothering to inform her doctors that she was leaving. It would cause a panic and draw negative attention that Harleen would once have avoided at all costs, but Harley couldn’t make herself care.

Her apartment was almost as bad as the hospital. While there weren’t sad faces offering their pity, the designer furniture she had convinced various men to buy her taunted her. Those schemes were small and pointless compared to what she was capable of. What J had shown her she could do.

For the most part Harley felt nothing, but then she’d be reminded of _him_. Then that gaping hole inside of her would open up and she would collapse. She couldn’t look at her apartment and her worthless trinkets from all her stupid games anymore. Somewhere between drinking the better part of her liquor cabinet and passing out on the floor she found herself throwing furniture against the walls as hard as she could and stabbing the cushions like they had personally insulted her. It was hard to say how long she’d been going, but by the time she’d finished her apartment was a mess of broken wood, smashed glass, and bits of upholstery. 

Once the tears came, they wouldn’t stop. How would she function without the person who saw her for what she truly was and wanted her all the more for it? What was the point of playing at her dull version of life when she’d seen glimpses of the life that she could have had with him?

She fell to the ground laughing, hardly noticing the broken glass digging into her knees. The wreckage of her apartment made her smile. There. Now her living space matched what she really was. The magazine ready, perfectly manicured space filled with decorations other people had paid for was utterly destroyed. Just like her.

* * *

J laughed at the man’s panicked expression that everyone made in the moments after they realized they’d been shot. The momentary flicker of amused relief quickly faded leaving J feeling itchier and more anxious then before. It had been days since he’d seen Harleen and he’d hoped that in the relative safety of his hideout he would have forgotten her like all the other ghosts who flickered through the life of whatever he was before he was the Joker.

He hated that he still found himself curious about her. What would she do next? Would she pretend to be a victim and lie through her teeth to keep pretending to be one of them? Would she give up on her game and kill herself? Would she let the authorities catch her? Would she let the madness she’d been trying to repress consume her? Did she still remember him?

J pulled the trigger of his handgun several more times, shooting pointless rounds into the dying man. It didn’t matter what she would do. Why should he even care? She was just a tool to breakout of Arkham and a toy to keep him amused while he was waiting. A tool that had played him like a damn piano and left him an even bigger black hole of rage and confusion than he already was.

Just a weeks ago he considered Harleen a strange specimen, an experiment in Arkham that he never meant to get attached to. Then everything fell apart.

He wasn’t sure why he just electrocuted her instead of killing her for what she’d done. He kept telling himself that he just hadn’t felt like it, but when did he ever not feel like killing? Even after all she had done to him, thinking about her dead made him feel like he wanted to crawl out of his skin and burn the world to the ground (and not for fun). He began to laugh at his own weakness, though he wasn’t really sure why. If he was honest with himself (which he tried very hard not to be), he wasn’t really sure why did most of the things he did when she was around.

He had hoped that she would just evaporate from his mind once he didn’t have to look at her every day and he could forget her. But his twisted psychiatrist had burrowed into mind and had been his constant companion since he left Arkham. He couldn’t forget the feral glaze in Harley’s eyes, the rapturous fascination she looked at him with, the way she felt atop him, the captivating words that dripped like venom from her lips, or her claims to ‘ _love’_ him.

Love. It made him laugh bitterly every time her words painfully looped through his mind. Love didn’t exist, and certainly not for him. It was just a lie that humans told each other to make themselves feel special. She was diminishing him, ruining him. Even if love did exist, she made it very clear what her kind of love looked like.

With a growl he stalked down to his garage. He couldn’t stand being in the hideout a second longer. He needed to get out of there before his voices started screaming at him for his fixation with a character a person who was dead to him used to play.

Throwing himself into tearing Gotham apart from the inside out had always made him feel better.

Hopefully the good doctor hadn’t ruined that for him too.

* * *

Harley awoke with the worst hangover of her life on the hard tile floor of her kitchen. She wasn’t sure what time it was, but her apartment was bathed in the warm dim light of early evening. Standing slowly, she appraised the wreckage around her. It was a fucking mess.

She stumbled to her bathroom and appraised her reflection. She was a fucking mess too. Her hair was oily and tangled, her face pale, eyes bloodshot, the remnants of her makeup she’d put on so many days ago smeared. A shower made her look more human, but it didn’t make her feel any more like one.

The pain was hard to describe. How could he leave her like that? He was her everything and he left her like she was nothing. He’d seen her monster and he’d wanted it. She was damn sure of that.

 _“He wanted ya’ till he thought you went and zapped him for not playin’ along with ya’ games.”_ A voice scoffed. Harley didn’t so much as flinch at the disembodied words, everything was already so upside down, so fucked up, the addition of ghostly commentary didn’t seem unreasonable.

Or at least not unreasonable by the insane standards of the last week or so.

 _“Oh please, telling him you love him didn’t contribute to him leaving? Don’t be stupid.”_ A different much more formal, neatly curated voice quipped, making Harley cock her head in detached confusion. That was new.

_“Yeah, yeah, yeah that din’it help nothin’, but I’d betchya we coulda talked ‘em into taking us with him if that had been the only problem.”_

_“You’re delusional.”_ The newer voice snorted, making Harley smile brokenly. There was something perversely amusing about a disembodied voice telling another disembodied voice it was delusional.

 _“And you’re a boring bitch,”_ the voice with the thick Brooklyn accent giggled. _“At least admit that he wouldnta shocked us if he didn’t think we’d just shocked ‘em.”_

 _“He’s a sociopath with a serious attachment disorder.”_ The cold, formal voice deadpanned in a tone that made no effort to hide that she thought the other voice was an idiot.

 _“And he liked us,”_ the first voice hummed happily, either not caring about or noticing the insulting tone.

“Liked.” Harley muttered to herself. He _had_ liked her. He wanted her. Telling him she loved him was stupid, but she didn’t think he would have hurt her for that. If he hadn’t just been forced to undergo ECT and if he hadn’t thought that she had ordered it, she was fairly sure she would have at least made it out of the breakout in one piece.

He didn’t trust her, though to be fair she didn’t trust him either. But he liked her, he wanted her, and she was reasonably sure he cared about her as much as he was capable of caring about someone. For him to think that she had done that to him, especially after trying to convince him that she loved him, made her sick to her stomach. To be honest, she was stunned he hadn’t killed her. He’d killed for much less and had killed all the doctors who’d ordered ECT on him in truly horrific and beautiful ways. The fact he’d left her breathing had to mean something.

 _“Oh, that’s healthy, Harleen.”_ The cold voice scoffed, _“he didn’t murder you so clearly he cares about you.”_

“Don’t call me that!” Harley snapped, shattering the silence of her ruined apartment. She wasn’t Harleen. Harleen, if she’d ever had been real, was gone. Insisting that it meant something that J didn’t kill her was fucked-up; she knew that. But she also didn’t care.

He was a dangerous, sociopathic, monster. If he didn’t care about her, he would have killed her. The fact he refrained from killing her after he thought she did the worst thing she could do to him had to mean something, damn it.

Her already broken heart shattered a little more thinking about what undergoing ECT must have been like for him. When she first met him, she wasn’t sure if he was capable of feeling emotions like fear or anxiety. But after months of talking to him and watching illicit recordings of him almost daily, she wasn't sure she was able to imagine what the panic he must have felt once he realized what Dr. Reed was going to do to him would have been like. And she didn’t want to imagine what he would have felt thinking that she’d ordered it.

Dr. Reed ruined everything, she snarled to herself. He’d hurt her J. He made him suffer. And in the process, he’d ruined things between them. As long as J thought she was the one who ordered the ECT he’d never let her near him again. If it had just been him dealing with her loving him, she could have talked her way back into his world. But this, this was so much worse.

And it was all Dr. Reed’s fault.

Dr. Reed had always been a condescending, paternalistic bastard but she hadn’t expected him to do something like this. Sure, Harleen had fantasized about hurting him before, but now knowing that he hurt J made Harley angry in a way she didn’t know she was capable of. Just imagining his wrinkled hands signing off on the ECT referral made her shake and clench her jaw so tightly that she thought she’d crack a porcelain tooth.

Before she’d made a conscious decision, Harley was marching to her closet while pulling out her phone and scrolling through her contacts. No one who hurt J like that could go unpunished. No one who made him push her away would get away with it. He was hers, anyone who got between them had to bleed for it.

She pulled on her clothes thoughtlessly before appraising her reflection. She looked presentable enough, or at least as presentable as she was going to get. She couldn’t mask the feral glaze to her eyes, but she didn’t need to. She wasn’t going back to hiding anymore. 

With a dangerous smile and dead eyes, she lifted the phone to her ear and waited.

“Dr. Quinzelle?” A clearly confused voice answered.

“Yes. Hi Dr. Reed, listen, I wanted to apologize for how our conversation went yesterday. I was in the neighborhood and wondered if I could swing by to apologize.” She said in her most demure, professional impersonation of Dr. Quinzelle.

She was only half listening to Dr. Reed while she drew two syringes full of the sedative that she had used on Karl just a week earlier. She made halfhearted sounds of apology and interest, but her mind was far away as she closed her apartment door behind her with a large, terrifying grin.

She had a toy to fetch and someone to give it to.

* * *

Joker sat in his booth appraising the crowd with a scowl. He supposed he should be satisfied with the line of underlings, gang leaders, and mob bosses coming to kiss the ring. He’d always loved watching powerful people shaking in their boots begging for his blessing. It was hilarious.

But as one person filed in after the next, he couldn’t even bring himself to pretend to listen. He didn’t care what they were talking about. He was far away trying not to think about the little monster that had implanted herself in his mind.

He growled to himself and took a deep drink of whiskey, making the heavily tattooed biker in front of him flinch. She quickly finished sucking up to him, pushed her protection money across the table, and all but fled the VIP section.

Normally her fear would have made him happy. Now her cowardice just annoyed him. It was so predictable. So boring. Every now and then he’d make a passing joke or thinly veiled threat at Gotham’s darkest figures but mostly he just laughed and smirked at nothing in particular while trying not to think about his dead little monster.

J signaled to his men to cut off the line. He couldn’t take another tedious conversation with another groveling gangster. Pouring himself another glass of whiskey, J leaned back in his booth trying to ignore his pounding head.

He wasn’t sure what exactly he felt. Anger, yes. Boredom, inevitably. And some other sinking sensation he couldn’t quite name. Whatever it was, he hated it. And it got worse whenever his thoughts predictably swerved back to _her_. The infuriating person who wasn’t even a person- she just a character who Harleen had played to manipulate him.

He threw back his drink, taking a deep gulp and pouring another glass. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could take being in the club hearing about gun deals and drug shipments. They were essential parts of funding his misadventures, but all he wanted was go find an unwilling toy and carve it apart until nothing was left. Or better yet, a whole bunch of toys for him to utterly destroy until he couldn’t remember Harley’s name.

* * *

Harley hesitated anxiously in her car, double checking her reflection in the rear-view mirror for any blood spatter she might have missed.

Earlier that week, which felt like a lifetime ago, she’d rejected the idea of going to the club to ask for a gun out of hand. Going there was a stupid idea then and it was an even stupider idea now. She didn’t even know if he would be there. But she only had so much time before Dr. Reed woke up and began trying to escape. She needed to find J before that happened.

Confronting The Joker on his turf with only a knife for protection was an undoubtedly terrible idea but she didn’t have any better ones.

She stood up before whatever was left of her rational brain could start working and sauntered to the door of the club. It was fairly early in the night for a strip club and there wasn’t much of a line. If the bouncers by the door gave her an odd glance, the hundred-dollar bill she slapped on the counter while stalking past them in leu of a cover fee seemed to silence their questions.

Harley’s eyes scanned through the dark and smoky room. Lights flashed over scantily clad women dancing on stages. She stood out like a sore thumb in her black skinny jeans and button up silk blouse, she didn’t look a thing like the lingerie clad women or tough meat heads that lined the walls. To the casual observer the angry young woman looked like a jealous girlfriend whose boyfriend had made too much of a habit of hanging around the strip joint. Thankfully for the most part the piggish men sitting in booths around the floor were far too distracted waving cash at the girls and chugging dark drinks to pay her any mind.

They didn’t need to know why she was really there.

Her eyes flicked over the floor looking for a VIP section. If J was at the club, he would be tucked away in a luxurious perch holding court. He wouldn’t be caught dead among the plebeians; he was far too grandiose for that. Her scowl transformed into a smirk as her eyes landed on a golden beaded curtain in the back corner of the large room.

He always had a taste for the garish.

She could barely hear the pounding bass of the music drowned over the pounding of her heart that she was fairly sure was about to beat out of her chest. Her eyes strained though the murky air hoping and praying to his bright green hair over the back of the booth’s cushion. He had to be there. He had to be.

Several feet from the VIP, just over the top of the booth, she saw him. It was just a sliver of his face. A hint of bone-white skin, greyish black tattoos, and the tail of his green undercut. He was here.

“Where are you going, lady?” A man interrupted, grabbing her upper arm and jerking her to a halt. Harley’s eyes flicked up to his face. He was a young man doing his best to hide the last of his acne behind a pitiful attempt at a beard. Harley growled to herself, a boy-man with a large gun and something to prove was not going to be the one to get in the way of her getting to her J.

A dangerous, mad smile inched across her face. The crushing weight of the last several days seemed to dissolve from her shoulders and the sinking feeling in her stomach, at least temporarily, was replaced with nervous excitement.

No one was going to stop her. Not when she was so close.

Without a second thought she pulled the knife she’d cleaned of Dr. Reed and his wife’s blood not even thirty minutes ago from her pocket and slammed it crosswise into the side of the boy-man’s neck, slicing through his jugular and windpipe, like she was merely swatting off his hands. She didn’t bother to pull the knife back out, not wanting to give herself an impromptu blood bath, or even wait around to watch the swaying teen fall to his knees.

Harley didn’t waste the handful of seconds she had before someone noticed what she’d done. She all but ran the last few steps into VIP and prayed that J would step in once his underlings inevitably retaliated against her for killing one of their own.

* * *

Joker jolted from his ruminations at the loud entrance of someone into his booth. His goons knew better than to enter his space without permission. They knew that at the best of times he was to be left alone unless it was absolutely necessary to speak it him. And this was not the best of times. He growled, aiming his gun at the intruder before he bothered to look at them.

When he finally did look up, J had to fight himself to keep his jaw from dropping at the inexplicable presence of his bold little doctor.

Their eyes locked, both of them expressionless in the intensity of the moment. J took a deep breath that he distantly noticed was shaky as he slowly stood slowly without lowering his gun. She looked like she was about to say something when suddenly one of his henchmen burst through the curtains and slammed her face first into the table.

“Sorry, Boss.” The henchmen grunted while trying to restrain Harley’s less than compliant body. “We’ll take care of her.”

“How did she get in?” J growled in an emotionless monotone, unsure what exactly the churning feeling in his gut was. Several more of his underlings ran into the booth, some covered in blood and all of them with their weapons drawn.

“The babysitters left the kid alone for five fucking seconds and he gets himself killed by some bitch.” The henchman ground out, pulling the still-struggling Harley against her front by her hair.

A flash of indescribable anger twisted with the strange sick feeling J only felt around Harley. Before he could think through what he was doing or why, he emptied his clip into the head of the woman pressing a now cocked gun to Harley’s neck.

The Joker’s goons were used a few of them being killed by their boss every so often, especially after he’d been incarcerated. They didn’t look particularly bothered, though slightly surprised, by the sudden murder of their compatriot. A few of them glanced at each other nervously. Joker distantly hoped that they interpreted his aggression as nothing more than irritation for letting the interloping doctor into his club.

“Take care of the bodies and get out.” He growled to the people over Harley’s shoulder.

Harley righted herself slowly with a small wicked smile on her lips that didn’t reach her empty eyes. Joker approached her slowly, placing his tattooed smile over her mouth and twisting her head side to side as if appraising her. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. Injury? A reason why she was there? Making sure she wasn’t some elaborate hallucination?

Harley looked up at him with big pleading eyes, clearly desperate to speak. He knew better than to think she was pleading for her life. She was pleading for him.

It was so fucking tempting to hear her out, but he knew if he listened to her lies The Joker would crumble and the person he was when he was with her would bleed out. He couldn’t let that happen. Especially with his goons so close by.

“Get out.” He whispered venomously at her, ripping his hand from her mouth like he’d been burned.

“Please, J.” She cried, “I didn’t know about the ECT. Please.” J’s head snapped up and his eyes narrowed. She came into his club, made his underlings look vulnerable in front of the rest of Gotham’s underbelly, forced him to defend her in front of them, now she lied to him. He distantly heard his voices hissing that he should kill her for her lies but his hand didn’t even reach for the still loaded gun resting in his shoulder holster.

“Don’t. Lie. To. Me.” He growled, taking a deep drink of whiskey before slamming the tumbler back down on the table so hard it shattered. He couldn’t tell if he was more amused or furious that she was denying ordering the ECT but either way it made him want to kill someone. Not her. But someone.

“I’m not!” She yelled back, “I didn’t order it, but I know who did. I have him waiting for you. Please, J.”

“Oh, that’s so very convenient, Harleen.” He purred angrily.

“This is convenient?” She laughed incredulously. “Kidnapping a coworker and killing a man to prove to the not-a-man I love that I would never hurt him like that right after being released from the hospital because that same not-a-man electrocuted me?” She shouted, reaching out to touch him.

“Don’t.” He growled, snatching her wrist out of the air mid-reach, preventing her from touching him. He couldn’t stand her words and her touch. It was too much. Too overwhelming.

“I love you!” She begged. J flinched; it was too tempting to believe her lies.

“Get out.”

“I love you.” She repeated, looking at him determinedly in the eye. Joker shoved her away from him and stormed out of VIP without looking back.

If she wouldn’t leave, he would. He needed to get away from her lies before the cracks in The Joker truly started to show.

* * *

Harley looked blankly at his retreating form. How fucking dare he. He wasn’t leaving her. Not again. Not like this.

She stormed after him, running to the street without noticing the stares of the club’s patrons. She could see his purple sports car tearing down the street. Her car was too far away, if she went to go get it, she would never catch up to him.

“Hey beautiful, want something more powerful between your thighs? Got one-fifty for an hour of your time.” A lone drunk biker leaning heavily on his motorcycle slurred from across the street, interrupting her panicked thoughts.

“Sure thing, baby.” She laughed, sauntering up to the swaying man. It wasn’t hard to push him off the bike, the man was barely able to hold himself upright. Swinging her leg over the seat and ignoring the swearing heap of a man on the ground, she gunned the motor after the fading lights of The Joker’s car.

It took several blocks for her to catch up, but as he crossed the Jenkins Bridge in the direction of Amusement Mile, she pulled next to him. She didn’t even attempt to disguise her desperate expression as she finally locked eyes with him. They were moving too quickly for her to really read his expression but to say he looked annoyed was an understatement. Before she could get a clear look at his face, he hid behind his hand as if he couldn’t see her, she wouldn’t be able to see him.

Harley didn’t bother to stifle her scream of frustration as she sped ahead of him. He wasn’t leaving her god damn it. Not again. She didn’t have a coherent plan to stop him as she gunned the bike as hard as it could go.

It wasn’t a good idea and she had no reason to think it would work beyond her needing it to.

She swung one leg back over the seat and slammed the bike down on to its side and held on for dear life. Relying on him to stop was a huge fucking gamble. Just because he’d spared her twice before didn’t mean he’d do it a third time.

Either way, it would all be over soon.

Her eyes locked with his while the bike skidded to a stop in front of his car. She closed the distance between the speeding car with a glare, daring him to run her over. How dare he help her release her monster only to leave her alone with it.

His breaks screamed in protest, his car screeching to a halt at her feet. He didn’t kill her, which gave her a small sliver of hope that only enraged her more. If he didn’t want her dead, why wouldn’t he keep her?

“You’re not leaving me. You’re not leaving me. You’re. Not. Leaving. Me.” She screamed, slapping the hood of his car. Most men would have been terrified of the unhinged expression on her face, but Joker hardly looked anything other than irritated and slightly confused.

How dare he look so annoyed at her, she fumed. How dare _he_ pretend that _she’d_ inconvenienced him. She’d blown up her whole life for him just to leave her behind without so much as a goodbye.

The small remaining rational sliver of her mind pointed out all the reasons he didn’t trust her, the ECT chief among them, but in the moment, she couldn’t bring herself to care. She told him she hadn’t done it. She helped him. She loved him. And he’d left her. Twice.

“I have done everything you said, every test, every trial, every initiation. I have proved I love you just accept it.” She yelled, not bothering to disguise her anger or desperation as he got out of the car to face her. He’d always said he liked her without her masks, she laughed darkly to herself.

“Got it, got it, go it.” He whispered in a growl. He raised his hands in mock surrender with an expression somewhere between a grimace and a grin while walking towards her slowly.

His voice made her weak, just the other morning she’d been terrified she’d never hear it again. It was haunting and terrifying, and she was completely addicted. But the comfort of his cold voice slipped away with each passing moment as her anger began to fade.

“I am not someone who is loved,” he continued before clapping, unwilling or unable to look at her. “I’m an idea. A state of mind.” Without the adrenaline of her anger to drown out her heart break, his words tore open her barely held together seems. Harley tried to repress her tears and keep a straight face, but she couldn’t. “I execute my will according to my plan, and you, doctor, are not part of my plan.” He continued circling around her.

Harley flinched at him calling her doctor. She wasn’t Doctor Quinzelle anymore. She wasn’t even Harleen. If he would just look at her, just talk to her she could make him see. In a fit of boldness, she reached forward to grab his face while he attempted to turn away from her.

“Just let me in, I promise I won’t hurt you.” She yelled after him uselessly, begging him to believe her.

* * *

“Promise? Promise?” J turned back with a bitter laugh, sounding altogether too human. How could Harleen promise that she wouldn’t hurt him? She took his memories, stripped him of the last pieces of his old life that he still had. She’d promised him she wouldn’t do that. No physical pain could compare to that. He was about to mock the irony of her claims to not hurt him when he was cut off by the loud honk of a semitruck trapped behind his car.

“Hey, dickbits mind screaming at your bitch somewhere else?” The driver yelled, stepping boldly towards the screaming couple. A wave of dark humor rolled through Joker. The man clearly wasn’t from Gotham.

The insult wasn’t terribly creative but something about it made him particularly look forward to killing him. He turned to enjoy the horrified expression on the trucker’s face once he realized who he was talking to when he felt Harleen grab a gun from his holster.

Joker twisted his head to look at her, surprised by how quickly she had moved. Harleen looked so indifferent, barely even looking away from him to aim, that she might as well have been waiting in line to order a coffee. There was no trace of emotion or recognition of what she was doing on her face as she shot the man in the chest. J looked at her, half impressed, and half amused by her indifference, before turning to look at the dying man.

“I was about to say I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” He smirked, before turning back to her.

He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting to see when he looked at her, but it wasn’t the barrel of a gun. It almost made him laugh, she claimed to love him and promised not to hurt him yet stole his memories and held a gun to his head.

J felt a confusing rush of emotions, some of them dark and painful, but the only one he could actually articulate was relief. Murderous rage and near-death experiences were old friends to him. At least this was familiar. He’d prefer to feel the cold metal of a gun pressed to his head than be forced to listen to her declarations of love any day of the week. This was safer.

* * *

Harley knew she should lower the gun, put it away, and talk to J like a grown up. But she couldn’t do it. Her hand was steady despite her furry as she held it levelly at his forehead. He looked surprised but somehow pleased.

“Don’t hurt me, I’ll be your friend.” He smirked with an almost childlike voice. Harley stood there, unsure what she was debating. For a moment something dark in her screamed at her to end the man who had torn her apart so thoroughly. He couldn’t leave her again if he was dead.

“Do it. Do it, do it, do it, do it.” J chanted with a smile. It was infuriating that he could look so amused and eager staring down the barrel of a gun but was so disgusted and terrified of her loving him. Her face crumbled despite her best efforts, more tears leaking down her cheeks.

“My heart scares you and a gun doesn’t?”

“Do it!” he screamed at her, seemingly desperate for her to prove his point or play into his punch line. But she wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Moments later he swung his arm in a wide arc, grabbing the gun with characteristic drama and pointing it at his own temple. He was laughing again. At what she couldn’t say- her weakness, at his own, at something else she couldn’t comprehend.

“If you weren’t so crazy I’d think you were insane.” He said with an oddly blank expression before all most growling the two words that she feared more than anything else. “Go. Away.”

“I love you, whether you believe me or not. Whether you want it or not.” She said through her tears, begging him to just fucking listen to her. J sighed loudly and began to turn away. In a flash of panic Harley grabbed him by the shoulder and forced him to face her while reaching for his gun again. Only this time instead of taking it and holding it to his head, she gripped his hand in both of hers and pressed the barrel of the gun to her sternum.

“Kill me or keep me, Joker.”

J looked at her shocked. There was an unfamiliar look in his eyes that she couldn’t quite identify. He tensed his arm, trying to rip the gun from her chest but Harley wouldn’t let him.

“Do it.” She demanded, staring back at him without any care or attention to the expression on her face. There was no point in masking her emotions anymore. He knew every inch of her.

“You are not part of my plan.” He finally ground out harshly, looking resolutely away from her. He tried to pull the gun away again, but Harley held it tight against her chest.

“Do it. Kill me or come with me. You don’t have to trust me, Joker, but at least let me give you one last gift.” Harley demanded despite being the one with a loaded weapon fatally aimed at her.

He said nothing.

“I wasn’t the one who ordered the ECT.” She said angrily. J froze, his thumb flicking over the hammer of the gun, cocking it while staring daggers at her. “Dr. Reed ordered it, not me. I didn’t know it was happening or he already would be dead.” She growled, not bothering to disguise the anger on her face. “Please, J. Just let me just show you. He’s going to die for trying to ruin your perfect mind.”

“He’s not the one who wants to ruin it,” J laughed bitterly under his breath.

“Why would I want to ruin you? You’re perfect.” Harley laughed darkly, smiling brokenly at him. “Just come with me. Just let me show you.”

J’s face had adopted an open mouth near blank stare. It made his red lips look particularly intimidating and his teeth glint dangerously in way that she’d come to associate with him feeling off balance or uncomfortable. He froze for a moment, his absent eyebrows tensing and relaxing several times before he abruptly dropped the gun. Neither of them reacted to the loud clatter of metal on pavement.

He stared at her intently, moving so close to her she could feel his breath against her face. J’s eyes bore into hers, she wasn’t sure what he was looking for in hers or what she saw in his eyes but whatever it was, it was conflicted.

“Are you lying to me, little monster?” He eventually hissed.

“I wouldn’t lie about this. Not to you.” She said, hating the raw desperation in her voice. His hardened expression faltered, clearly waring with something in his mind. He abruptly turned and stalked to the passenger door of his car and tore it open.

“Get in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why is writing scenes from the movie so hard? I actually really like the cannon of the highway scene but goddamn, I would have loved to see what she said to get him to bring her to ACE. I'm slightly worried what Youtube thinks of me for watching this scene so many times to get the dialogue right but hey, sacrifices had to be made!
> 
> I enjoyed writing this chapter way too much (and may have made an accidental reference to the 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie in the process) and am working my way through fine tuning the last bits of the last chapter. I had thought I was done, I'd even uploaded it to AOW, but like the masochist I am decided a few days ago that it needed some more work. Is that in part to expand the reward several of you (cough, CjB16, cough) have been looking forward to? I don't know, maybe, shut up.
> 
> I am now back to working and am getting ready for a cross country move during a pandemic so there is a non-zero chance I may need an extra week to finish the last chapter. If you don’t see me next Wednesday, it’s because I’m busy hitting my head against my keyboard between shifts and packing boxes. (Hopefully) see you next week for the finale!


	10. Baptism

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Was it worth it?” Harley asked, actively choosing to ignore his use of her old name.  
> “You tell me,” he growled, “you’ve one foot in each world, which do you like better? Playing Harleen’s games or Harley’s? Their world or mine?”   
> “Harley’s.” She murmured, looking down at the chemicals suddenly wondering if he was really asking her to do what she thought he was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys… how is this over? I can’t believe this is the last chapter.

“Where to, Barbie Monster?” J growled uneasily gripping the steering wheel until his knuckles cracked.

“Bristol, by the country club.” She responded, wisely keeping any other commentary she might have had to herself. The creature next to him stared at him in rapt fascination as if he might disappear if she looked away. He tried his best not to look back at her while debating if he was more relieved or horrified to have her in his car.

The yawning hole in him that had been screaming ever since he’d left her behind at Arkham finally shut up. But now his voices angrily chattered at him for trusting the little monster.

He didn’t know if he believed that she hadn’t ordered the ECT, but he wanted to. Which in his experience was a good sign that he shouldn’t believe her. He wanted it too badly. Wanted to believe the monster by his side was utterly devoted to him, to chaos, to freedom in the same way he was.

She was fascinating and so, so very twisted. If she hadn’t ordered the ECT and she really had brought him the person who had as a sacrifice… J bit back a growl. What the fuck was he going to do?

He was still furious at her for her little stunt in the club. And issuing him an ultimatum on the highway. And he was completely fucking terrified of her claims to love him.

He didn’t know what he was going to do with her, but he would at least see what his monster had to show him before he decided. Or at least, that was what he told himself. His voices mocked him for stalling and clinging onto the few remaining stolen moments with his monster before things needed to end. Though just what kind of end, how deadly it would be, his voices debated vigorously. 

“Take a left here, it’s the fifth house down.” Harley interrupted his thoughts as they drove past the country club. J shook his head out of his daze, unsure of how long he’d been driving and more than slightly impressed that he’d still somehow managed to get them to the correct neighborhood.

“Very demanding little monster,” he growled, stopping the car and stepping out gracefully. “Ladies first.”

“How gentlemanly,” she rolled her eyes and sauntered ahead. She took him down a manicured street to a perfect white McMansion that was nearly identical to every other McMansion on the street. “This one. Go around back, I left it unlocked.”

J grunted in response and forged ahead, gracefully jumping over the fence. He stormed ahead, thoughts of the infuriating woman beside him falling to the wayside (at least for now). If this man truly had tainted his few memories, corrupted what little past he thought he still had, it was far more important to kill him than worry about what to do with her. He jerked open the door and stepped into what appeared to be a living room.

“Where is he, little monster?”

“Garage,” she said gravely. J looked at her oddly, there was a different kind of anger flaring in her eyes than he’d seen before. He’d seen her pissed, he’d seen her murderous. But this was the most dangerous furry he’d ever seen from her. The only reason he could attribute to her rage was that the man she was presenting him had (she claimed) been the one to order ECT on him. He supposed watching other people hurt her made him angry, after all he’d killed one of his goons for it just a few hours ago… but the idea that anyone could be angry- let alone this angry- on his behalf confused him.

Harley, seemingly unaware of his confusion, sauntered over to a large white door that had been left ajar and flicked on the lights. J followed behind her cautiously, unsure how to interpret her apparent emotions.

“Whose there?” The man demanded from somewhere in the garage, “what do you want? Please we have money, anything you want. Please, don’t hurt us.”

Harley stopped between two rather expensive sedans and smiled broadly at J with furious eyes and gestured to the ground where an older man lay hog-tied face down in a puddle of blood. 

“Us?” J looked over at Harley with a raised eyebrow, wondering if there would was another toy lying around somewhere in the large room.

“His wife,” Harley rolled her eyes, “I already took care of that one upstairs. The floor is yours, no interruptions, Mistah J.”

“Harleen? Is that you? Are you ok?” The man called anxiously, “What’s going on?”

“It’s me Doc, and I’m right as rain” she giggled.

“What’s going on? Why aren’t you tied up? Who are you with?” He demanded making Joker laugh sarcastically.

“My, my, my so many questions doctor.” Joker purred, appraising the items scattered around the garage. “What do we have here?” He asked, looking at the various tools Harley had left scattered around the floor. A hammer caked in dried blood, from the wife he assumed. Several knives, though their quality and size left something to be desired. There were a few hammers, drills, and a demolition saw scattered on a worktop next to several jugs of what he assumed was gasoline on the far side of the room. Those would be useful later, he absently noted to himself.

“Oh my god! Is that the Joker? Harleen what’s going on?” Dr. Reed sputtered, attempting to flip over. “You’re with him?”

Joker just laughed, trailing his fingers over the tools. It wasn’t much compared to his usual collection, but it would do. He picked up a baseball bat that had been leaning against the worktable with the tools, swinging and flipping it dramatically a few times.

“Don’t you know it’s rude to ask your guests so many questions?” Joker said with dark amusement.

“You betrayed us.” Dr. Reed croaked, craning his neck to look up at Harley with pure horror.

“I would have to have been on your side in order to betray you,” she shrugged casually, “but, yeah, somthin’ like that.”

“Our host is rather rude. Harleen, my dear, teach our toy some manners.” Joker chuckled darkly, holding the bat out to Harley with a smirk. He wasn’t totally sure why he was letting her have first crack at his toy. If his goal had been to extract information his skill set was far more developed than hers. And it wasn’t like he was one to share toys, especially toys that had tinkered with his mind. There didn’t tend to be much left of those once he was done with them and anyone who laid a hand on them while he was playing didn’t usually survive the experience. But for some reason, he had some bizarre unspecified craving to watch her tear apart a toy she claimed had ordered the ECT.

“With pleasure, J,” she said with barely concealed shocked before taking the bat almost reverently. She lifted the bat over her head and brought it down in rapid succession on the doctor’s ribs. J smirked approvingly despite himself. He hadn’t gotten to see her first two kills and she’d looked so bored while shooting the man on the highway. This was far more entertaining. Whatever else it was, Harleen’s monster was a thing of beauty- even if he wasn’t entirely sure if she was his Harley or not.

“Enough.” Joker said, clearing his throat and shaking his head to focus. “We still need him to be able to talk.” Harley pouted but lowered the bat to her side and flipped over the whimpering doctor, propping him up against a car. The man’s back had taken the brunt of the beating but one eye was almost swollen shut and his nose was clearly broken from whatever Harley had done to him earlier.

“Dr. Reed tell Mr. J here what you were telling me the other day in the hospital,” Harley cooed, running a finger down his cheek.

“I- I- I” He stuttered.

“Yes, you, doc.” Harley giggled, slapping him. “Now tell Mr. J here what you told me at the hospital.”

“It’s Mr. Wayne’s fault! Not mine. He was so worried about The Joker’s influencing you, he’s the one you want!” He begged. Joker’s grip tightened on the hammer he’d been evaluating for its utility in his games. He normally enjoyed hearing his victims beg, but this one denying what he needed to hear made him furious.

“Whose idea was the ECT?” Harleen growled, slapping him across the face again but this time hard enough that his neck made an audible cracking noise.

“I don’t know! Please, Harleen, let me go.”

“Oh, you don’t know?” Harley snorted, “you’ve been trying to convince me to use ECT on him since you gave me his file months ago. You’ve never cared about what it would do to him, You’ve wanted to destroy his perfect mind since you found out he was coming to Arkham!” Harley picked up the bat again and hit him hard in the chest, knocking him back to the ground, before straddling his chest and wrapping her hands around his neck.

“Tell him what you told me in the hospital.” She growled furiously.

“Please…” Dr. Reed whimpered, loud snuffling sobs interrupting whatever else he was going to say. Joker ground his teeth, forcing himself to wait. See what Harley could extract from the man… see if maybe, just maybe she’d been telling the truth. That maybe she was the monster he wanted her to be so badly.

“Tell him.”

“I… I… he was hurting everyone, and I had promised Mr. Wayne! You weren’t being objective- I had to do what needed to be done!”

“You didn’t have to do anything!” Harley growled, her nails digging into the older man’s fleshy neck.

“I had to! Look what he did to you!” The doctor gasped hoarsely.

“You wanted it. You wanted to punish him. You wanted him to suffer.” She ground out between her teeth, hitting his head against the concrete floor, frenzied and furious.

“Of course, I did. He… he deserved it.” Dr. Reed gasped. Harley screamed a wordless shout of rage at the ashen, dazed man whose eyes had long since slipped out of focus.

Joker froze at the man’s words. He could dimly hear Harley yelling something at the doctor. He was aware that each accusation and threat was punctuated with a vicious hit of the bat. But in that moment, he was struck by two things so clearly that he couldn’t truly pay attention to the beginnings of his bloody revenge. One, the bloody mass of flesh on the floor had taken and twisted his last few faded memories. And two, he had absolutely no idea what he was going to do with his furious little monster.

Joker’s world narrowed to the bloody lump on the floor. Any and all thoughts of Harley and what to do with her could wait till later. There were more pressing concerns to be attended to.

“He’s perfect. How dare you try to ruin him. You don’t get to hurt him. You don’t get to blame me for it. How dare you try and turn him on me. You don’t get to steal from him from me.” Harley screamed in a voice that could only be described as beyond furious, still hitting the man, seemingly oblivious to the Joker’s presence by her side.

“Step aside Harley.” Joker growled; any traces of emotion gone from his face. He was done playing with his food. Harley froze mid-swing of her bat and backed up. She looked hungry and furious but, in the moment, there were more important things to do than consider her monster’s perfection. Far more important.

Harley might have killed; she might have even tortured. But it was time for her to see what an artist could do.

“Thank you for your honesty, Dr. Reed.” Joker purred in a haunting monotone, pulling a long thin knife from his pocket. “That’s all we will be needing from you.”

* * *

Harley look on in awe at what The Joker had done to her former boss. She hadn’t known half the things he’d done were possible or that humans were able to scream like that. It was horrific and magnificent all rolled into one.

After it was over, Joker leaned against the hood of one of the cars. His eyes were vacant and tired in a way she wasn’t familiar with. Without the skin and hair, he would have looked alarmingly like any other man.

“J?” Harley whispered, slowly approaching him. He didn’t respond, just continued to stare into the distance. She reached her hand out and touched his face. Joker jolted, raising a hand to strike her. “It’s me.” She whispered, quickly snatching his hand out of midair.

J slowly lowered his hand, his fingers still intertwined with hers, and looked down at her with a confused expression on his face. Harley wasn’t sure if her lack of fear or common sense was permanent, but she seemed to be particularly prone to tempting fate that night. Before she could think about the risks too hard, she wrapped her arms around J and crushed him to her chest. He froze in her arms, neither protesting the contact nor encouraging it.

After a long moment he pulled back, taking her face in both his hands and looking at her cautiously. He’d done that to her before, but there had always been a rushed almost rough urgency to it. This time his motions were blurred with exhaustion and his searching gaze was as close to soft as she’d ever seen. What he was looking for, she couldn’t say. She just stared back and hoped that he found whatever he was looking for.

“Do you really want this, Harley?” He finally whispered, wiping away the blood splatter on her cheek.

“Yes.” She said simply and solemnly, unsure of what ‘this’ was but knowing she wanted everything he could give her and then some.

“I have a place I need to show you.”

“I’ll follow you anywhere, J.” Harley murmured. She turned to go, looking at him over her shoulder with a small smile. He was frozen on the hood of the car staring at her like she was an alien or some kind of mythical creature that he hadn’t dared to believe existed.

“You comin’?” She asked with a laugh in her voice that made J shake his head almost violently before a smirk crawled across his face.

“First things first, Little Monster.” J laughed bitterly, walking over to the worktop in the corner of the garage and reappearing with several gallons of gasoline she hadn’t noticed. “I don’t share my toys with Gotham PD.”

Harley hadn’t ever seen a fire like that before. Sure, as a kid she’d lit her share in dumpsters and trash cans, but they had been small, amusing blazes. This was different. Dangerous, beautiful. J zig-zagged around the garage and lower floor with a cruel smile, leaving trails of fuel behind him. Before long, J’s laughter twined with the roaring of a completely uncontrolled blaze, making some kind of horrifying lullaby that Harley wished would never end.

But all too soon, he’d cryptically told that it was time to go and had ushered her to his car. The two sped away from the once flawlessly manicured now smoke-filled private roads of Bristol. Harley didn’t know the geography of Gotham well enough to pinpoint where they were going exactly, but she knew they were headed in the general direction of Amusement Mile. But as the miles and minutes ticked by, they sped past the reaches of the artificially gleeful park and into a nest of decrepit and half destroyed factories.

J looked conflicted, his mouth tight and his absent brows furled. She couldn’t be sure what he was debating but the torn expression on his face was far to conflicted for her to feel anything close to confident or optimistic.

The few stars that peaked through the heavy smog cover of Gotham had just started to fade and the black sky had begun to turn and inky grey when the car finally came to stop. It was a tall industrial building that looked like it had been abandoned for quite some time. Large, chipped painted letters on the side of the building read ‘ACE Chemicals.’

Harley looked at him questioningly, was this his current hide out? Before she could ask, J stood and got out of the car with a loud sigh.

“Follow me,” he grunted without looking back. Harley held her tongue and followed him curiously, baffled as to what they were doing at what appeared to be an abandoned chemical plant but willing to follow him anywhere. He led her through an emergency exit whose door had been half torn off on the side of the building and gestured for her to climb a set of rickety metal stairs.

It struck her as odd that there were vats full of some unknown bubbling chemical below them in what appeared to be an abandoned building. She was half tempted to ask him about the mysterious slime, but the all too blank expression on his face as he stared down at the vats silenced the words before they left her lips.

“Do you remember the first time we met, you asked me where I was born?” J said after a long moment of silence in a tone she didn’t recognize. Harley started, unsure where he was going but hungry for whatever he was willing to tell her.

“You said Gotham made you,” she murmured with a small smile, thinking about their first meeting. “And you said something about being born fully grown like Athena.”

“Good memory, little monster.” J sighed, raking a hand through his hair. “I may have omitted some details in my answer.”

“You?” Harley laughed before she could stop herself, “I don’t believe it.” J laughed distractedly looking down at the vats far below them.

“Before” he began, pausing with a tilt to his head as if the words were physically painful to say, “before I was this, whatever I was… he fell into those.” Harley looked down at the multi-story drop in horror. “The person drowned in those chemicals and I came out the other side.”

Harleen looked up at J, shocked. She had about a thousand questions, but they all stuck in her throat unable to come out. The curated, careful voice in her mind ordered her to ask about that man who had fallen in and what had happened to him, but she couldn’t form the words. J never spoke about his life before he was The Joker willingly. Other than angrily yelling at her that he had dreams of his past, he had never even admitted that he had ever been anything other than The Joker. Him talking about his past, unprompted, was some kind of breakthrough that she couldn’t begin to guess how to respond to.

“I crawled out of this factory a different creature than I came in. Every day I forget more and more about what he was. I used to know why he was here that night, what made him fall in, but that’s all gone.” J said quietly with a twisted expression.

“J…” Harley began, unsure how to comfort a man so unsuited to being comforted.

“Don’t pity him, Harleen.” Joker snarled, “Whatever he was, he’s dead. I traded in the trappings of humanity for pure chaos a long time ago.”

“Was it worth it?” Harley asked, actively choosing to ignore his use of her old name.

“You tell me,” he growled, “you’ve one foot in each world, which do you like better? Playing Harleen’s games or Harley’s? Their world or mine?” He looked at her with an intensity that she’d only seen on his face a handful of times.

She knew there was a right and a wrong answer to his question and she could only hope the honest answer was the right one.

“Harley’s.” She murmured, looking down at the chemicals suddenly wondering if he was really asking her to do what she thought he was.

* * *

J stared at her trying to steady his breathing. Bringing her here was a massive gamble. He hated the itchy painful feeling of vulnerability. Normally, he avoided ACE like the god damned plague. Every now and then when his nightmares got too bad, he would find himself drawn to the place. He’d spent more than one night sitting on the stairs wondering who the hell the person who had fallen into the chemicals had been.

He hadn’t been back in years, but she needed to know. She either needed to die so the almost-person he became when he was with her could be killed or Harleen had to be completely annihilated and Harley transformed like he had been. There was no third option.

“Question,” he asked, running the back of his hand along her arm. “Would you die for me?” He wasn’t sure where he was bothering to ask. It was obvious she would die for him (her little stunt on the highway had shown him that if nothing else) but he didn’t know how to ask what he really wanted to know.

“Yes,” she responded with a smile, turning from looking down at the vats of chemicals stories below them to look him in the eyes.

“That’s too easy,” J growled, looking away to think of what he was truly asking her. “Would you…” he paused, unsure if he wanted to know her answer, and momentarily unable to get the words through the tightness of his throat. Taking a deep breath, he asked hesitantly and with more seriousness than he’d felt before, “would you live for me?”

He couldn’t understand what that sensation in his chest meant other than that he needed her to say yes. But he knew the answer would be no, no one lives for anything but themselves. Everyone wants power, to claim, to control. He would show her that there is no such thing as love and then... he wasn’t sure. Normally he’d say kill her, but he’d failed at that before.

“Yes,” she said, more quietly this time.

“Careful,” he said wagging a finger at her, his voice choked with a kind of threatening emotion he’d never felt before. She might think she was telling the truth; she might even think she loved him, but he couldn’t let her destroy him so frivolously.

“Do not say this oath thoughtlessly.” He raised his hand over her mouth, silencing her protests with his tattooed grin. “Desire becomes surrender, surrender comes power.” He whispered like sacred words while staring unblinkingly into her eyes.

He slowly lowered his hand to explore her gentle smile that was so at odds with the monster within. He pressed a finger to her lower lip, standing so close he could feel her breath on his face.

“Do you want this?” He asked, pointlessly. He knew what she wanted, she wanted him with every inch of her madness. He was less sure of what he wanted. If he accepted her desire, if he admitted his own, he would lose some of his power, but he would gain her monster.

“I do.” She said confidently, louder and more impassioned than her previous yeses.

He raised his hand again to her face.

“Say it, say it.” He whispered, staring at the ceiling. “Say it. Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty.”

“Please,” she all but whimpered looking at him like a god.

“Mhm, you’re so good.” He groaned, grabbing at the air in front of him as he stalled for time. Panic flared inside of him. He could tell she knew what he wanted her to do and he didn’t doubt she that would do it. What he wasn’t sure of was what he would do in response.

She turned to look down at the vats below her one last time before turning back to face him. He wasn’t sure what the expression on her face was, but he stared at her as if it would be the last time that he saw her- well aware that it might be. He smiled, holding out his hands to her and he watched in a strange combination of awe in horror she raised hers out to her sides and let herself fall gracefully backwards into the empty air.

J walked numbly to the ledge of the platform watching her limp body fall headfirst into the chemicals bubbling bellow them. He froze, his face going completely blank and swallowing roughly. The Joker couldn’t dive after her. He couldn’t go down the stairs and wait and see what emerged from the vat.

No, The Joker would leave it up to chance, he turned on his heal and forcing himself to walk away. If she lived, she’d come find him and he’d cross that bridge when they got there. If she died… if she died.

J froze, breathing heavily, three steps from the ledge. His stomach dropped, if she died…

With a loud growl, J rolled his neck and turned around violently. He charged the few steps to the ledge while ripping off his leather jacket. In the moment he hated his weakness, hated his attachment to the fascinating monster, hated her, hated himself. His voices roared at him to leave her behind, but as he dove with sickening grace, all he could think was that as long as she lived, he didn’t give a fuck what the voices screamed.

He never thought he’d be here again, diving into a vat of chemicals at ACE. It was fucking insane. Stupid. But there he was- free falling, slamming hard enough into the liquid that his shoulders and chest would be bruised the next day, opening his eyes to the caustic slime to search for the shadow of her body.

In a blind panic he reached around, searching for any sign of her. His stomach was churning with something like fear, as close to terrified as he’d ever been, when his hand finally wrapped around what felt like a bicep. With a mad grin, J pulled her body to his chest and kicked off the of cold metal bottom, launching them to the surface.

Gasping a deep gulp of air, J looked down at the limp new-born monster in his arms with something like awe. Even the loud emergency alarms blaring from the side of the vat and the suction of the rapidly draining slime couldn’t divert his attention from her. He was to consumed staring at the creature who had willingly jumped into a vat of acid with the insane hope that he would keep her.

An ecstatic, uncontrolled feeling somewhere between power and victory flooded his veins. Harleen was dead and gone. Before he could think about what he was doing or why, he pressed his bright red lips to her pale white ones.

Like some kind of sick, twisted Disney princess, at the touch of his lips Harley jolted in his arms. Her eyes flickered open and stared at him as if she wasn’t sure any of this was real. As if maybe she’d died, and this was her afterlife. Harley looked up at him with some combination of shock and joy. She either didn’t bother to or was unable to conceal her surprise that he’d dove after her, that he’d chosen her. J couldn’t help share her shock.

J didn’t have the vocabulary for what she looked like just then. Even covered in slime and dazed from the events of the night, was fairly certain the best word for her was perfection. Still reeling from the terrifying ecstasy of her willingly falling into the acid for him, he gave up trying and wrapped one hand in her hair to crush her lips against him.

Any memories he had of women had long since corroded from his acidic baptism and rounds of ECT but that didn’t seem to matter when his lips pressed against hers. Harley gasped into his mouth, fisting his hair in one hand and griping his shoulder in the other. His skin wasn’t being bleached the way hers was, but it was still sensitive and her lips against his hurt in the most delicious way he could imagine.

J pulled away to gasp for air. He couldn’t help but moan at the sight of Harley’s flushed cheeks and swollen lips. She was panting, making her chest pulse against his rhythmically. He was captivated by the sight of her whitening skin against his bleached flesh. As he pressed his lips back to hers, he knew there would be consequences. But they couldn’t matter less.

The thin skin of one of their lips burst open from the pressure of their kiss. The taste of blood made J pull back with a wide grin, clinging her to his chest and laughing loudly. Harley was all monster and she was all his.

* * *

Harley could barely breath through her laughter. Her skin burned and her clothes were rapidly disintegrating, but she didn’t care. She’d never been so happy. Laughter bubbled from her throat uncontrollably as she wrapped her arms around J’s neck.

Their previous kisses had been all violence and comedy. They hinged on brief loss of control. This kiss was still violent, but its passion exceeded a momentary lapse or impulse. It was surrender to the madness that pulled them together like gravity. It was desperate and consuming, but this time neither fought it.

She was distantly aware of J pushing her towards the side of the tank, wading through the few remaining feet of slime, but couldn’t bring herself to care. Her back slammed against what might have been a ladder but her head was too fuzzy to think. Their rough kisses, the caustic burn of the acid around her shins, and the feeling of one of his hands trailing from her hip towards her breast was far too distracting. She knew they should get out of the tank and rinse off whatever chemicals they were covered in, but she didn’t care. She’d fantasized about having J like this for so long that simple things like basic safety were entirely irrelevant.

His breath hitched against her face as she sucked gently on his lower lip before darting her tongue along the seam of his mouth. Tentatively, his mouth opened, and his tongue brushed against hers. She couldn’t help but moan as their kiss deepened, unconsciously pressing the length of her body harder against his and biting at his lips.

Without breaking their kiss, Harley shuffled backwards until she was able to seat herself on a rung of the ladder and wrap her legs around his waist. Harley couldn’t help but whine at the unexpected sensation of his growing hardness pressing against her slit. She knew their clothes were dissolving but she’d been too distracted to notice just how much they had disintegrated. Judging by the rough grunt that escaped his lips and involuntary buck of his hips, neither had he.

“Harley,” he growled ducking lowering his lips to her neck and biting hard at her flesh. He attacked with a series of rough bites and hard sucks. Harley moaned with a grin while digging her nails into his scalp and dragging deliciously painful lines down his suddenly exposed back, she’d be covered in his marks the next day and she couldn’t wait. She wanted to be utterly consumed by the intoxicating violence that was buzzing between them.

J growled again, grinding his now completely hard cock against her wetness. Harley gasped, arching her hips to align his length with her clit and crying out when the stroke of his hips pressed against her oh-so-perfectly. One of his hands that had been clutching her hip with near bruising force trailed up her torso. His long fingers traced teasing lines around her breast before beginning to pinch and rolling her nipples. She let out a loud cry, her legs tightening around his hips and bucking even harder against him.

J growled, slapping his hand against the side of the tank loudly before gripping the ladder over her head. She was completely overwhelmed, the adrenaline of her fall, the sensation of his lips and hands, the consuming desire she’d had for him for months. Having him between her thighs was surreal.

He pulled back fractionally, allowing his free hand to migrate from her breast to the crotch of her ruined jeans. His hand teased along her upper thigh before running the length of her now soaked cunt. Harley inhaled sharply just as J grunted at the slickness between her thighs. His fingers traced the length of her labia before tracing mindless circles around her clit. One finger snaked lower, teasing her entrance with torturous leisure.

“Please,” Harley cried desperately, bucking her hips hard against his hand.

A needy whine escaped Harley’s lips as he sunk two fingers deep inside her. His fingers moved slowly, almost hesitantly. After a few moments of shifting, he began to slowly thrust them in and out. The stretch of his fingers twisting and curling inside her was somewhere between pain and perfection. Once his fingers rotated to press against the spongy tissue of the front wall of her vagina, she couldn’t help but knot her fingers in his hair and pull him closer to her in a desperate tangle of teeth and tongue.

Harley smiled madly against his lips, moaning at the idea of that she had The Joker, the man she wanted more than anything. The actual sensation of his unsure fingers pressing against her hypersensitive flesh was almost too much, but she wanted more. Wanted everything.

“Please, J.” Harley wined, her hips writhing against his hand. Her impatient fingers unknotted from his hair and trailed down his torso to unzip what was left of his trousers. She quickly fisted his cock, marveling at the hard and dripping length in her palm, pumping long slow strokes up and down his twitching length. If she had the patience she would have dropped to her knees and taken him back in her mouth, but her dripping slit and his broken growl made it impossible for her to do anything other than spread her legs wider.

J’s fingers thrusted hard inside of her one last time, his hips flexing spastically against her hand, before tearing himself away from her with fire blazing his eyes. Even in their afternoon in Arkham’s therapy room he’d never looked at her like that. No one had.

“Please J,” she whined, pulling his hands from her pussy and sucking his wet fingers into her mouth while staring into his crazed eyes. Her feet tangled behind his hips to pull him back between her legs. “I need ya just like this. Right here. I needjya.” She growled honestly into his ear, biting down on the lobe before flicking her tongue around it.

His biceps bulged as he stared down with her with heat that she’d only dreamed of seeing in his eyes. He froze for a moment, conflict clearly warring on his face before he crushed his lips back to hers.

“Careful what you ask for,” he growled, shoving his dissolving trousers down his hips and roughly pulling her tighter against him.

“Fuck careful,” Harley purred back, knotting her fingers back in his hair and crushing their smiling lips together with bruising force.

“Whatever my Little Monster wants,” he growled against her lips.

* * *

J was completely mindless. Letting himself do _this_ with _her_ was a terrible idea, it was unforgivable. But of all his sins, fucking his Little Monster in a near-empty vat of acid was the least of them.

He carefully lined himself up with what Harley thought might be shaking hands. For a moment he fumbled, his tip sliding over her absurdly hot, wet sex and pressing against her clit making her let out another needy whine. Her whine shot through him, making his leg twitch with impatience. He gripped himself tight again and forced himself to sink his tip with agonizing patience inside of her tightness.

He made it all of an inch before a broken sounding moan escaped his lips. The feeling of his monster’s cunt strangling his tip as she transformed before his eyes was too much. Without a coherent thought, he thrust into her with a single near-brutal motion that made both of them cry out in desperation. J froze between her legs, eyes closed with his lip between his teeth.

“Don’t move.” He grunted, his face pinched and focused. She felt too good. The heady combination of their joint murders, her acid swim, her submission to madness, her unending and fascinating defiance, and the way her body wrapped around him was too perfect. It all coalesced into a singular uncontrollable sensation that threatened to make him come far too soon.

“Fuck me like I’m yours.” Harley purred.

“No.” He grunted, griping her hips with near punishing tightness, making her whine in frustration. “I’m not going to fuck you _like_ you are mine,” he growled, beginning to slowly rock his hips against her “you _are_ mine.”

Harley cried out with an inarticulate pre-verbal sound of want, her pussy spasming around his length with near deadly perfection. J gripped the rung of the ladder above her head tighter in a useless attempt to redirect his need. She was too much. Too perfect.

“Harder! Please, I need you!” She begged, her whimpering wines ringing through his body like a gong, making his balls twitch in anticipation. She was his. All his.

J pressed his lips hard against hers, hoping to silence her temptation with teeth and tongue. As soon as he thought he’d succeeded, she started pulsing her pussy around him while moaning against his lips making him tear his mouth from hers in a desperate move to regain control.

“Fuck.” He gasped, distantly aware of his choppy uneven breathing as he began to move harder but still painfully slowly inside of her.

“I can’t J, please. More!” Harley gasped against his lips. His hips sped fractionally faster against her, filling her with tortuously slow strokes. “Give it to me J. Give me everything.” She groaned, flexing herself at him and biting the juncture of his neck and shoulder hard enough to draw blood.

Something broke in J as a lusty groan escaped his lips and his hips slammed into her.

* * *

Harleen had never particularly enjoyed sex, let alone rough sex, but his relentless pace that had him bottoming out each time made her cry out for more. She didn’t know if it was the chemicals, the adrenaline pulsing through her veins, or just the fact the man she loved more than life itself was between her legs- and she didn’t particularly care as long as he never stopped.

J suddenly shifted, picking her up and placing her so that her ass was perched on a slightly higher rung of the ladder and his hands were gripping the bars on either side of her head so tight that she absurdly wondered if he’d somehow dent them. 

She couldn’t tell if it was intentional, but the new angle had him rubbing up against her G-spot with every thrust making each one more and more delicious. But the rotation of his hips had taken pressure of her clit, making Harley squirm restlessly trying to find friction.

She half wished she could tackle him to the floor and ride him so her clit could get the attention it needed without losing the feeling of him pounding deep inside of her. But just the idea of him stopping, even if it was just for a moment while she took him how she needed him, almost made her want to cry. She was half certain that if he stopped, she would die.

* * *

J didn’t have words for how it felt having her wrapped all around him, her lips against his, her cunt gripping his cock like a vice, as he watched her bleach and transform before he eyes. The closest he could get was a mindless grunt. He fucked her faster trying to ignore the tingling in his balls and how her desperate noises made his cock twitch.

“Please, J, please.” She chanted mindlessly.

“What does my little monster need?” J gasped in a pitiful attempt of his usual hyper controlled purr.

“Need'ya.” She cried making him smirk. Her hips were working against his as hard as they could, and her wetness was beginning to drip down his cock. “So much, need'ya.” Her hips canted as if trying to press herself harder against his, making her snarl in frustration at the limits to their contact in the more-than-slightly-inadvisable position they found themselves in. J smirked, suddenly realizing just what she needed.

“Touch yourself,” J ground out between clenched teeth, as desperate for her to come as he was to come himself. “Now,” he ordered, giving her a single harder thrust that made her shout and throw her head back, banging into the rungs of the ladder.

Harley lowered one hand from where it had been roughly pulling his hair to snake between their intertwined bodies. Almost instantly J could feel her clenching and shivering around his length in delicious ways that made it damn near impossible for him not to come.

“Fuck!” he gasped as Harley’s muscles twitched in warning around him. She was keening almost non-stop now. His balls were drawing in tight; he wasn’t sure how he’d managed to last that long to begin with but didn’t think he could last much longer.

“Please, let me come!” She begged, making J grunt desperately. If he’d been able to think he would have laughed. Let her come? He was internally begging for it, praying that she’d come around his cock and drag him with her before he exploded.

“Yes, Harley,” he groaned against her lips, “come for me.” He pulled back to watch her face as her hips began to lose all sense of rhythm and her face warped into the beautiful expression he’d only seen once on Harleen’s face. “Be a good Little Monster and come for Daddy.” He growled, biting the juncture of her neck and shoulder hard enough that she would be wearing a bruise in the shape of his teeth for days to come.

“Yes! J- fuck I’m gonna” Harley’s voice cut off with a high pitch grunt as she began to spasm around him. J marveled at her expression, trying to keep his eyes open as his own arousal reached a crescendo. 

“Mine,” he grunted, giving into the blissful moments before release.

“Yes, J, all yours.” She cried, scratching her nails down his back and embedding them on his ass. His will faltered and he returned his lips to her neck to muffle his shouts as his balls pulled tight to his body and expelled months’ worth of denial. His hips moved frantically against hers before freezing and thrusting almost imperceivably as he came.

“Mine.” He repeated softly, panting against her grinning lips. J wasn’t sure how long they stayed there but eventually his softening length slipped out of her, making them both groan. He reluctantly pulled away, privately mourning the loss of her skin on his, appraising the new creature sitting before him.

She was making some kind of contented moan, almost purring in satisfaction, tracing mindless circles on his chest before her hand trailed down his arm and her fingers intertwined with his. Without thinking, J rested his head on the crown of her whitening hair, pressing a kiss he chose not to think about to her forehead as he attempted to regain a somewhat acceptable respiration rate.

By the time he convinced himself to pull away from the monster who had curled up on his chest oh-so perfectly, light was streaming in the dirty windows far above their heads, giving the demon in front of him a murky halo. J smirked down at her and gestured for her to climb up the ladder. He admired her almost completely naked form above him, standing speechlessly in a small puddle of goo.

“Where are we goin’, Mistah J?” Asked Harley, looking down at him from halfway up the ladder with a tired, mad smile. J paused for a moment, shaking his head as if he could dispel the madness of the last twelve hours, before turning and smirking up at her and saying words he was damn sure he hadn’t said since his last swim at ACE.

“We, my Little Monster, are going home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, this goes without saying but guys, PSA- if you ever fall into a vat of mystery goo, please take a shower and see a doctor before having sex. This is pure fiction and we’re having fun with comic book physics/biology rather than actual real-life physics/biology. Do not try at home. I’d say no sociopathic clowns were harmed in the making of this fanfic, but let’s be real they both definitely should see a doctor (who isn’t Dr. Quinzelle) at this point.
> 
> On the note of what is next for writing, my general goal has always been to rewrite and expand my first story into two separate stories with Metamorphosis as the prequel. ‘If These Walls Could Talk’ was an exploration of this pairing and it really shows in the earlier chapters. By the end of the story I had a much better grasp on the characters and a clearer version of the story I wanted to tell. The whole point of a second draft is to make it look like you knew what you were doing all along and that is (generally) my goal.  
> But (and it’s a big but) I about to start my PhD program in a few weeks and it will be hard to make time to write. I am working on it and since I am reworking rather than starting from scratch, it may be a faster process, but it will likely be some months before you hear from me again.  
> As always, your comments mean the world to me and I’ve loved sharing this twisted duo’s misadventures with you.


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